Here are some minor corrections to the article Which Videos Are Protected? Lawmakers Get a lesson published on February 26th.
The article quotes “C-Span said that it had for first time asserted its copyright against a video-clip site, ordering YouTube to take down copies of Stephen Colberts pointed speech…” This neglects a the smaller players that have been affected by C-SPAN take down notices see the C-SPAN and intellectual property article on Wikipedia.
Additionally the articles does not address the trademark issue. Although the floor footage is public domain the only copy the public has access to is encumbered with C-SPAN’s trademark and this has provided a grounds for which C-SPAN has requested sites take down otherwise public domain footage. Our site metavid has been hosing this public domain footage with the trademark removed. Metavid’s conversations with C-SPAN in early 2006 showed that C-SPAN would leverage its trademark rights to force the removal of floor footage. The real story here is one of selective enforcement, and how citizens have no real, reusable, permanent access to committee footage.
Update: As boing boing pointed out today Carl is working to change the situation of limited archival access to committee footage. Check out what he has grabbed so far.
posted by dale at 1:16 pm
Metavid will be participating in the Beyond Broadcast conference of 2007. Like last years conference its shaping up to be a key exploration of participatory culture and its potential to enable powerful tools for citizen engagement. Henry Jenkins giving the Keynote and schedule is action packed with projects and speakers addressing the state of politics and participation on the internet. look interesting… see the schedule
Metavid will be co-running the beyond youtube working group where we will explore contemporary political participatory media, and give some usage demos of metavid.
Like last year it will be possible to “tune in” via the internet. So if your interested in seeing portions of the conference check out the beyond broadcast site at or around February 24th 
posted by dale at 11:28 am
For those of you wondering where the clips of the new 110th congress are, well…. The bad news is that we’ve had some trouble importing the metadata from outside sources and are entering it in by hand, a tedious process which has made it difficult to run the image_crawler scripts which find the ‘person id’ and other useful metadata. The good news is that we have been capturing, so we have the footage - it’s just waiting to be scanned. It will be up soon!
In the meantime, here are some of the last speeches of 02006.
Update: 02007 streams are coming online. We hope to have the House’s war “debate” up by Beyond Broadcast this weekend.
posted by dale at 12:29 pm
For those of you wondering where the clips of the new 110th congress are, well…. The bad news is that we’ve had some trouble importing the metadata from outside sources and are entering it in by hand, a tedious process which has made it difficult to run the image_crawler scripts which find the ‘person id’ and other useful metadata. The good news is that we have been capturing, so we have the footage - it’s just waiting to be scanned. It will be up soon!
In the meantime, here are some of the last speeches of 02006.
Update: 02007 streams are coming online. We hope to have the House’s war “debate” up by Beyond Broadcast this weekend.
posted by aphid at 12:29 pm
Update mv_embed.02 has been released its a bit more user friendly and has the latest cortado player.
In response to a request the mv_embed code has been packaged as a stand alone component. This should enable its usage on other sites that want to embed ogg theora clips without those annoying plug-in install requests from the browser that point to non-existing auto install systems.
Mv embed has been tested in windows on (IE 6 (activeX vlc) IE 6(java), Firefox 2(vlc plugin), Firefox 2(java), Opera(java) … on linux: Konqueror (java), firefox(java) … If people find other platforms or combinations that do not work let me know about & if it’s the script’s fault I will see what I can do 
Often we are limited by the java applet framework which has a few issues… As established in the FOMS meeting: we really need native ogg theora support in firefox & an IE compatible theora plugin.
(more…)
posted by dale at 12:20 pm
