- Byron Clark
from The Spark July 2007
Last month New Zealand’s new free to air digital television service Freeview launched in what the National Business Review described as “a somewhat anticlimactic manner.” Broadcast minister Steve Maharey described the move to digital television as an even bigger event than the switch to colour TV. But these words would have fallen on deaf ears of a generation switching off their TV sets in favour of blogs, podcasts, Youtube videos and the wealth of other entertainment available on the Internet.
Freeview does however have some potential for the growing number of political bloggers, the future content of the network includes a 24 hour news and information channel, as well as a channel that will broadcast parliamentary debates. Content from both these channels, uploaded to Youtube, could be used by bloggers the same way that the online news media and parliamentary records are used today. The boundary to this however is copyright, and while any blogger can quote from Hansard or The New Zealand Herald without a problem, the use of video clips for the same purpose is a different matter, and would technically be prohibited under current copyright laws. A solution does not necessarily require a change in legislation. Content from these new channels could be put into the public domain- meaning anyone could use it however they liked- or licensed under a Creative Commons, a new form of “less rights reserved” copyright, sometimes referred to as “copyleft” where creators of works grant the public rights to copy, share, edit or otherwise use their work in ways not allowed by traditional forms of copyright.
This is not a new idea. Lawrence Lessig, the law professor behind the Creative Commons organisation had lobbied the major US political parties as well as television news networks in an effort to get them to licence political debates under a Creative Commons licence, or put them in the public domain. Surprisingly he has had some success, with possible presidential candidate Barack Obama stating in a letter “the Internet has enabled an extraordinary range of citizens to participate in the political dialogue around this election … We, as a Party, should do everything that we can to encourage this participation.” The media companies -who own the copyright to the debates they broadcast- have been less supportive, responding to Lessig but sidestepping the real issue.
Back in New Zealand if state-owned TVNZ wants to really be “public” television it should adopt Creative Commons licensing for its new channels, the question comes down to, will New Zealand’s politicians trust the public to be the new political commentators and reporters? Or will they maintain the copyright status-quo?
