As the US election draws near, I noticed something happening that I wasn't sure how to respond to. I was flipping through Lawrence Lessig's blog, one of the few I follow and he linked to a letter from the McCain campaign asking that YouTube not pull their videos because they felt the videos fall under what are considered "fair use" of some television clips. It's an interesting letter and I think it's worth the read if you care about digital rights at all. I'm delving slightly off the data path here with a look at digital rights, so indulge me a bit today.
The campaign people were asking that some additional investigation take place on these clips, especially as they are in a time crunch with the election. I can understand that and it makes some sense, but at the same time, should they get special treatment? What if they are overstepping their bounds on copyright issues, should they be allowed to take advantage of that to sway people in the election? Is it fair to the Obama campaign?
I saw one article saying that McCain wants special rules, and YouTube says that they're complying with the DCMA (PDF). Personally I feel that the DCMA is a problem and copyright law is a little ridiculous. Authors like me deserve some protection, but not to the extent that the US has taken it. It's a little crazy, and the McCain campaign is paying the price for some poor laws from both parties and the last two Presidents.
This relates to the data side in that I'm sure there are not only legal, but technical people that are giving opinions on whether this data, video in this case, is a copyright violation. Someone technically might be examining it for length and bytes to check and see if it matches something else. With media it might be easier, but what do we do when our other data's ownership starts to get called into question?
This is an area that needs a lot of work, debate, and compromise over the next few years. Protecting the rights of data owners, which includes each of us individually along with companies, data gatherers (mostly companies) and data consumers (almost anyone) is not easy, but it's important. I think in the US we've neglected the rights of the small data owners, but overprotected the rights of information producers. We need to find a balance, somewhere between Richard Stallman and Disney.
It's out there, but we need to work on it.
Steve Jones
As an FYI, I'm an undecided voter, liking both candidates. I don't really want a political debate in the forums, but if you want to try and sway me one way or the other, drop me a note (sjones at sqlservercentral dot com).
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