C-SPAN caves to pressure - sort of

The cable television network has obviously heard the complaints and is realizing that asserting copyright over footage of committee hearings was a bad move. So they're changing their policy in what we welcome as a sign of progress:

Advancing its longstanding mission of bringing government closer to the people, C-SPAN announced today two major initiatives designed to greatly expand citizen access to its online video of federal government activities, such as congressional hearings, agency briefings, and White House events.

These actions are intended to meet the growing demand for video about the federal government and Congress, in an age of explosive growth of video file sharers, bloggers, and online ‘citizen journalists.’ The policy change is effective immediately.

• C-SPAN is introducing a liberalized copyright policy for current, future, and past coverage of any official events sponsored by Congress and any federal agency-- about half of all programming offered on the C-SPAN television networks--which will allow non-commercial copying, sharing, and posting of C-SPAN video on the Internet, with attribution.
• In addition, C-SPAN also announced plans to significantly build out its Capitol Hearings website as a one-stop resource for Congressionally-produced webcasts of House and Senate committee and subcommittee hearings [...]

The new C-SPAN policy borrows from the approach to copyright known in the online community as “Creative Commons.” Examples of events included under C-SPAN’s new expanded policy include all congressional hearings and press briefings, federal agency hearings, and presidential events at the White House. C-SPAN's copyright policy will not change for the network's studio productions, all non-federal events, campaign and political event coverage, and the network’s feature programming, such as Book TV and original history series.

We agree the footage of committee hearings - any official House and Senate business - ought to belong in the public domain, which goes beyond putting it under a Creative Commons license.

But this is a step forward. We license much of our content under a Creative Commons license - we are also strong believers in copyright reform as well as an end to digital restrictions management schemes that infringe on innovation, academic freedom, and other legitimate uses of intellectual property.

Now if only TVW would follow suit...