Creative Commons
Obama’s Site Should Be Public Domain
By law, all works of the United States government are public domain unless classified or contracted. That’s why I find it odd that President-Elect Barack Obama’s transition site, Change.gov, would adopt a Creative Commons license. I’m a huge fan of the freedom offered by the Commons, but a Creative Commons license is still more restrictive than a public domain dedication. Change.gov bears the top level domain of a government office, but not the copyright policy.
I’m as big an Obama fan as the next guy, but this is really making me scratch my head here. Even if Change.gov were created by a government contractor, and thus subject to copyright, a restrictive license is simply inconsistent with Obama’s platform of transparent governance.
It’s not like anyone will steal Obama’s content and pretend to be the next leader of the free world. The Obama transition team should just put Change.gov under a public domain dedication and be done with any copyright headaches.
Why Copyright Law Must Change
In early February 2007, Stephanie Lenz’s 13-month-old son started dancing. Pushing a walker across her kitchen floor, Holden Lenz started moving to the distinctive beat of a song by Prince, “Let’s Go Crazy.” He had heard the song before. The beat had obviously stuck. So when Holden heard the song again, he did what any sensible 13-month-old would do — he accepted Prince’s invitation and went “crazy” to the beat. Holden’s mom grabbed her camcorder and, for 29 seconds, captured the priceless image of Holden dancing, with the barely discernible Prince playing on a CD player somewhere in the background.
Ms. Lenz wanted her mother to see the film. But you can’t easily email a movie. So she did what any citizen of the 21st century would do: She uploaded the file to YouTube and sent her relatives and friends the link. They watched the video scores of times. It was a perfect YouTube moment: a community of laughs around a homemade video, readily shared with anyone who wanted to watch.
Sometime over the next four months, however, someone from Universal Music Group also watched Holden dance. Universal manages the copyrights of Prince. It fired off a letter to YouTube demanding that it remove the unauthorized “performance” of Prince’s music. YouTube, to avoid liability itself, complied. A spokeswoman for YouTube declined to comment.
This sort of thing happens all the time today. Companies like YouTube are deluged with demands to remove material from their systems. No doubt a significant portion of those demands are fair and justified. Universal’s demand, however, was not. The quality of the recording was terrible. No one would download Ms. Lenz’s video to avoid paying Prince for his music. There was no plausible way in which Prince or Universal was being harmed by Holden Lenz.
Revisiting ideas from his TED talk last year, Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig posts an article in the Wall Street Journal outlining how and why copyright law must change. This is a must-read for anyone who creates and shares anything in the 21st century.
