Liberating & Restricting C-SPAN's Floor Footage

bigmammoth writes "C-SPAN's bid to "liberate" the House and Senate floor footage has re-emerged and been shot down. In an aim to build support a recent New York Times editorial called for reality TV for congress. But what is missing from this editorial is the issue of privatization and the subsequent restriction of meaningful access to these media assets. Currently the U.S. government produces this floor footage and it is public domain. This enables projects such as metavid to publicly archive these media assets in high-quality Ogg Theora using all open source software, guaranteeing freely reusable access to both the archive and all the media assets. In contrast C-SPAN's view-only online offerings disappear into their pay for access archive after two weeks and are then subject to many restrictions." (Continues)

"If C-SPAN succeeds, reusable access to floor footage will be lost and sites such as metavid will be forced to stop archiving. Because of C-SPAN's zealous IP enforcement metavid has already been forced to take down all already 'liberated' committee hearings which are C-SPAN produced. Fortunately, the house leadership sees private cameras as a loss of 'dignity and decorum' and will be denying C-SPAN's request."

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[Dachannien]

Everything that happens on the floor ends up in the Congressional Record anyway, which is publicly available within a couple days of it happening. It's text, which means it's searchable, which makes it a ton better than video when it comes to accessing what you need. It also includes all the extraneous material that gets included in the record but is never read on the floor.

Many committees provide streaming audio of their open proceedings even if they aren't covered by C-SPAN, but transcripts of committee meetings aren't usually made. Unfortunately, the second most "closed" part of Congress is the numerous committee meetings that are closed to the public. (The first most "closed" part is all the back room dealings that result in 11th hour and 59th minute changes to bills in conference, and I don't expect that to change with the Dems in power, either.)

But the winner in openness (modulo their impartiality) has to be the Supreme Court, who, though they don't televise their proceedings, now make transcripts of arguments available within a couple of hours of the event.

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[hazem]

The "record" is not worth much, rally. Most of them start their floor addresses with "I ask unanimous consent to revise and extend..."

This means, barring any objection (which would be rude), that the congressmember can go back after the fact and change the record of what they said and even add new material. You can actually find far more "said" in the record than could physically be spoken during the stated time period of the debate.