Last week, Stanford Law’s Lawrence Lessig petitioned both the DNC and RNC to arrange with the TV networks for open licensing of debate footage. The purpose of public domain licensing, or at least, Creative Commons licensing was so online participants could post, share, or even remix footage.

It’s all about furthering the democratic process, you see.

It didn’t take Obama long to join Lessig, Jimmy Wales, Arianna Huffington, and even Michelle Malkin in that cause. The Illinois Senator pounded out a letter to Dean, asking for his support of not only open licensing, but also of "citizen generated content."

"We, as a Party, should do everything that we can to encourage this participation," he writes. "Not only will it keep us focused on the issues that matter most to America, it will also encourage participation by a wide range of our youth who have traditionally simply tuned out from politics."

Though a believer in strong copyright protection in the digital age, Obama denied that political debate footage needed the same considerations, and noted also that televisions would still have incentive enough to broadcast.

All that’s well and good, but an already somewhat controversial candidate, especially one that espouses the cause of the little guy while pounding the podium on the power of "citizen generated media," should watch how his campaign managers handle the little guy’s contributions.

Joe Anthony, WaPo reports, is a 29-year-old paralegal who has dug Obama ever since his landmark speech at the DNC in 2004 (landmark because, as a freshman Senator, nobody’d ever heard of him before that, but everybody liked what they heard) that he created a MySpace fan page.

Obama and his crew dug Anthony’s page so much they made it their official MySpace home. 160,000 friends later, a campaign spokesperson says Anthony’s page is "bigger than him" (campaign spokespersons should really watch their grammar, don’t you think?) and took the page over.

And when I say, took it over, I mean they got MySpace to block Anthony from accessing it. They could do that, says MySpace, because the address had Obama’s name in it.

Though the details of the dispute are murky, WaPo’s Jose Antonio Vargas reports Anthony sent the campaign a $39,000 bill for over two years of service, and removed his name from the Obama friends list.

Oh well, love the sinner not the sin they say – at least until the sinnin’ gets out of hand. 
 

Stanford Law’s Lawrence Lessig initiated the movement on his weblog, publishing open letters to both the DNC and RNC with 75 signatories, including Wikpedia founder Jimmy Wales, Craig Newmark of Craigslist, MoveOn.org and Arianna Huffington on the left, and blogger Michelle Malkin and RedState.com founder Mike Krempasky on the right.

Currently, the major television networks hold full rights to debate content, limiting the reach of the content as well as controlling what is done with it. Lessig and company feel the Presidential debates are too important face the barriers of copyright in an age of Internet video sharing on sites like YouTube and Blinkx.

The signers are pressuring the committees, especially the DNC, which recently announced it would sanction six official Presidential debates, so the committees can pressure the TV networks. Networks are notoriously heavy-handed regarding use (even fair use) of their content.

“The big TV networks should not be the only ones determining which sound bites are newsworthy after a debate," said Adam Green, MoveOn’s Civic Action Communications Director. "Everyday people should be able to put candidates’ positions on YouTube and share them with others without fear of breaking the law.”

“Technology has exploded the opportunity for people to comment upon and spread political speech,” said Lessig.  “I am very hopeful that both the Republicans and the Democrats will help encourage the extraordinary public discussion around the election that the Internet has enabled, by removing any uncertainty about the right of the people to comment upon the speech of presidential candidates.”

Lessig admits that many "rightly and fairly struggle over" copyright issues, the place of copyright in political debate is one more difficult to justify. In order to ensure a more genuinely participatory democracy, any network broadcasting the debates would be required to license them freely after the initial broadcast by putting them in the public domain.

"I am confident that I won’t like much of what this freedom will engender," Lessig writes on his blog. "But if that were a legitimate reason to regulate political speech, this would be a very different world."

Already dubbed "the YouTube Presidency," the 2008 election coverage has fully crossed all media. The Internet is living up to its potential as candidates and politicians post messages at video-sharing sites, and social networks like MySpace announce their own Presidential primaries.

In order to saturate convention attendees, Yahoo will, according to TechnologyMarketing.com, employ an airport information kiosk, campaign buttons, signs that will appear in JFK and LaGuardia airports, and hotel keys with the Yahoo Search brand on them.

Linda Bennett, Yahoo’s senior brand manager says, “This year it’s all about politics, so we thought being able to highlight Yahoo as a politics engine, in line with the Life Engine campaign, would be a cool thing.”

This campaign is similar to the one Yahoo launched during the Democratic National Convention.

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