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. 
 

See, Toni Basil on a stout-girl pyramid isn’t enough to make the new generation stop in their channel-flipping tracks. And when so many other networks aren’t fully taking advantage or even grasping the transformation taking place, Viacom seems, after a lot of time on the innovating bench, ahead of the game.

Interactivity is the name of said game, and keeping the attention of the ADD generation takes a lot of work. But this is the way all of it is going: completely interwoven content.

In April, MTV is working with Yahoo! to allow users to submit their own movie spoofs as a part of an MTV Movie Awards promotion. One will be selected as the winner of the "Best Movie Spoof—User Generated" award on the show, from five user-nominees.

During the live broadcast on June 3, the awards show will be tied in with Web surfers, whose (edited for content – and always very, very deep) comments will appear on the so-called World Wide Web Wall, or as Downtown Julie Brown used to call it, the wubbawubbawubba.

"Viewers are constantly telling us they want to dig deeper into the content they see on-air, and they are obsessive about following our programming from one platform to the other — and back," said Christina Norman, President of MTV.

"When the TV show ‘The Hills’ inspires a community of fans to connect with their favorite cast members and devour exclusive content online and on the handset, the payoff for viewers is a more immersive experience all the way around."

MTV.com streamed 84 million videos in January, and over 85 million in February, this year, increases of over 200 percent year-over-year. On average, the site gets about a million visitors a day.