This is fantastic news, related by Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig:

Due to the historical nature of presidential debates and the significance of these forums to the American public, CNN believes strongly that the debates should be accessible to the public. The candidates need to be held accountable for what they say throughout the election process. The presidential debates are an integral part of our system of government, in which the American people have the opportunity to make informed choices about who will serve them. Therefore, CNN debate coverage will be made available without restrictions at the conclusion of each live debate. We believe this is good for the country and good for the electoral process.

First, you may be a bit surprised to even learn that, yes, the television networks hosting the debates have always held the copyright to the appearance of the candidates. If you wanted to use the debate audio and video, you would have to assert “fair use” and the associated provisions (comment, criticism, parody, and proportionality in relation to the whole work). C-SPAN was the only one who had said they would free up the coverage. But the announcement by CNN is the first one by a major media company.

If you think about it, the established practice is quite ludicrous. In an era before the Internet, or even broadband Internet, there was no impetus to press for change. What could one do with the video anyway, other than edit it around on your VHS cassette?

But in an era of YouTube and citizens generated content, it made the case obvious. Lessig made a plea to both the RNC and DNC in April 2006 to demand all the networks free up the content with CC licenses.

I hope all the U.S. networks will agree to the same type of freeing of debate footage.

There’s a lot of post-mortem analysis of the cyber-revolt that intimidated Digg.com into their current stance of allowing an HD-DVD key to be left on it ssite. It’s not over at all. Digg and the AACSLA will have a lot more interaction in the future.

There are three views I’ll highlight here:

(1) REPORTING. The NY Times got a part of the reporting wrong re: Wikipedia. They mentioned firms getting “letters” from the AACSLA:

Last month, lawyers for the trade group began sending out cease-and-desist letters, claiming that Web pages carrying the code violated its intellectual property rights under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Letters were sent to Google, which runs a blog network at blogspot.com, and the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. [ref]

According to all reliable sources, the Wikimedia Foundation has never received anything from the AACSLA on this matter. Though the Times acknowledged this in the “Corrections” part of the site [ref], they should include a correction on the article page itself. Also, the IHT still has the erroneous claim, as of this writing. [1, 2]
(2) MEATSPACE. Fellow blogger Ryan Shaw points out these cyber-revolters should actually engage in something useful in the real world to effect change, instead of simply cyber-wilding:

If the Slashdotters and Diggers of the world spent their time engaged in real activism, instead of getting their kicks being part of a mob, maybe we’d have seen some progress on DRM issues by now. But that would involve doing more than just clicking on posts while you’re in your parents’ basement waiting for torrents to download. [ref]

(3) THE VALUE OF DIALOGUE. On Wikipedia, there has been a running debate whether the call by admins “in the field” to delete the HD-DVD key “on sight” was correct.

In Wikipedia-related mailing list debates, some thought having the key in articles was legitimate. Some expressed disgust about the DMCA making “a number” illegal, while others said the Wikimedia Foundation board should chime in with an “OFFICE” action (which would actually be an incorrect use of that doctrine). But for now, the policy holds — the insertion of the full key is treated as spam and disruption, because it likely runs afoul of DMCA law.

As for the rationale, Kat Walsh (User:Mindspillage) had an excellent distillation of the issues. It shows why Wikipedians, as a deliberative and thoughtful community that thinks VotingIsEvil [1,2], came to a more reasoned stance than Digg.

If deleting something illegal is “out of process”, process is broken and should be ignored. (And possibly changed. Either way, the result should be the same.)

I see posts further in the thread going on about how admins can’t be trusted to determine what’s illegal. This is no argument, however, for not requiring that what actually is illegal shouldn’t be deleted. If someone makes a mistake in judging that, correct it. The world doesn’t end if something is down for a few hours or a few days that in the long run shouldn’t be.

Look, I’m no fan of the DMCA anti-circumvention rules; neither, I suspect, are most of us. But Wikipedia is not a venue for unrestricted free speech or for copyfight activism through civil disobedience; that’s just not what we do. We’re a venue to create an encyclopedia under a free content license, as an alternative to the content only available within the current heavy-handed and wasteful system of copyright, and we’re actively trying to encourage more content be created with the same freedoms — which people on all sides of these disputes should be able to support.

Hosting illegal content doesn’t help us do that. For one thing, it would divert our resources from our primary goal; for another, it’s just not what we set out to do. We delete things we believe to be illegal; this is not a new development, though it strikes more of a nerve in some cases than others.

To the extent that Wikipedia is fighting the current system of copyright, we do it through making alternatives viable — accepting only free content that can’t legally be locked up with DRM, using only formats that don’t require proprietary software or patent licenses. That method is weakened if people try to take on the current system
head-on through the site, also.

(Reproduced with the permission of Kat Walsh. She posted in her own capacity and not that of a Wikimedia Foundation board member.)

In the world of user-generated content (or crowdsourcing, if you will) today was historic. The storm clouds gathered this morning when I started receiving meta-content and flickr photos about what was brewing on Digg.com.

And then I saw the elements align perfectly for this disaster:

• The issue: copyright of movies and video
• The technology: encryption key of HD-DVD discovered
• The community: digg.com users who posted the key
• The conflict: “censorship” of the key by digg.com higher ups
• The villain: the MPAA, RIAA and the Advanced Access Content System
• The co-conspirator: digg.com

What happened was an all-out cyber-revolt, with the three most visible and popular usergen sites in the crosshairs — Digg.com, Slashdot and Wikipedia. It shows both the power and the danger of crowdsourcing, and the fickle balance between the mob and the operators.

How did it start? Users at Digg.com submitted stories related to the discovery of a key, a string of 16 bytes, that were related to the decryption of the new HD-DVD technology. It looks something, but not exactly, like the following:

09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c1

Digg was understandably concerned about violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which forbids circumvention technology. There are lots of critics about the breadth of this law, and its direct opposition to ‘free culture’, but until it is successfully challenged in court, it is pretty clear folks should take down information about circumvention (emphasis mine):

From U.S. Code TITLE 17 > CHAPTER 12 > § 1201

(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that—

(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;

In a rare, but not unusual, move, Digg.com suppressed these user-created stories to prevent running afoul of the DMCA.

That did not sit well with the crowd, made up of young male techies with a penchant for net libertarianism, and some of them outright info-anarchists. Cries of “censorship” and being in bed with industry flew. It did not help that HD-DVD was a sponsor of the sister podcast Diggnation. Even more accusations erupted about a conspiracy.

It was as if you were at a Berkeley picnic and yelled “narc!”.

Diggers who felt slighted ran to shout the story from their virtual rooftops at sites like Slashdot and Wikipedia, the other cousins in the usergen family to make a spectacle and make a point.

Wikipedia articles such as [[HD-DVD]] and [[Digg]] were inundated with references to the verboten key. And just like Digg, Wikipedia administrators excised any mention of the key immediately, just as they do with copyright violations or libelous content.

With that avenue blocked, the protestors took a different tack — new articles cropped up in Wikipedia with the key, usernames were created with the key, categories were formed with the key.

As I was hanging out in the administrator’s IRC chat room, there were roughly a dozen or so admins fighting the attempts to add it. They deleted articles, blocked users, blocked IP numbers and “salted the ground” so certain articles could not be created. After an hour or so, they had it under control.

Unlike Digg, Wikipedia is accustomed to floods of malfeasance. It’s a top ten site, after all. Its caretakers have created the tools, policies and methods to deal with onslaughts like this. Social capital of the administrators played a big role in the end to encourage longstanding users to pitch in and delete references. Though Wikipedia didn’t exactly escape criticism.

“I should add that Google has 27,000 hits for this code. It is 100% encyclopedic. Shame on the admins here…” [ref]

Wikipedia locks out “the numbers”
wikipedia too! freedom of speech is dead. [ref]

Slashdot was a different story, and became a refuge for the disgruntled. The meta-moderated community has always been the more refined, thoughtful older brother in tech news. It was the first online Web salon of techies, with members so influential Wikipedia was for a time dubbed “the encyclopedia that Slashdot built.”

Slashdot carried an article about the entire case, and users posted open references to the string of bytes, even putting it as a tag along with the story for all to see. Slashdot let it stand, and found itself in good graces of the geek crowd. It was the beacon for net liberty.

Digg, however, was not so lucky. In the end, the latest darling of the dot-com world was at the mercy of its drive-by users. As a pure voting site, it does not have mechanisms to create sophisticated community norms, as user cooperation is determined only by individual up/down votes. So Digg’s paid staffers were on their own, trying to take the big hits and fending off the PR disaster. It did not go well.

The cybervillage suddenly had a mob with torches and pitchforks, and they were setting things ablaze in acts of cyber-wilding.

After a good six hours of this hammering on the site, Digg’s front page was changed to “We’ll be back shortly. Digg will be down for a brief period, while we make some changes.”

At around 9pm West coast time, Digg creator Kevin Rose made an astonishing post to the blog, with the taboo string as the subject.

Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c1

Today was an insane day. And as the founder of Digg, I just wanted to post my thoughts…

In building and shaping the site I’ve always tried to stay as hands on as possible. We’ve always given site moderation (digging/burying) power to the community. Occasionally we step in to remove stories that violate our terms of use (eg. linking to pornography, illegal downloads, racial hate sites, etc.). So today was a difficult day for us. We had to decide whether to remove stories containing a single code based on a cease and desist declaration. We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code.

But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.

If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.

Digg on,

Kevin

This is quite unprecedented — you basically have a multi-million dollar enterprise intimidated by its mob community into taking a stance that is rather clearly against the law.

It’s even more fascinating if you realize the amounts of money being considered. Business Week had a front cover story about Digg, where they said,

So far, Digg is breaking even on an estimated $3 million annually in revenues. Nonetheless, people in the know say Digg is easily worth $200 million.

This hundred million dollar company has decided to follow its crowd, and face the music (and movie industry). It shows that Web 2.0 has a dynamic very different from the original dot-com boom of the 1990s.

Of the free labor that is the “Digg Army,” 94% are male; more than half are IT types in their 20s and 30s making $75,000 or more. It’s a demographic advertisers lust after.

Yes, but these are certainly not just passive Maxim Magazine readers who just want cool gadgets. They are passionate, activist and resourceful. They will turn on you in a second if you look, sound or smell like a sellout.

In the movie Gladiator, the elder fighter Proximo said to the Russell Crow character, “I was the best because the crowd loved me. Win the crowd and you will win your freedom.”

For now, Kevin Rose seems to be betting the company on that advice.