Broadband Plan To Include Video Archive, and Seek to Alter Copyright Law
Two sources, here and here, have now confirmed some blurbs seen on Twitter the last few days that March’s upcoming Broadband Plan will include the proposition of a website called Video.gov. Tony Romm of The Hill has suggested that it would be an archival type service and would be run by the Library of Congress among several other archival agencies. The obvious guess may be that this would also encompass video archives from our nations Smithsonian Exhibits. And while I don’t think Google’s YouTube guys are going to come after this thing, it does appear that the people planning it are about to understand what YouTube management goes through on a daily basis with copyright issues.
Next Gov’s Aliya Sternstein reported that the FCC’s Eugen Huang, Director of Government Performance and Civic Engagement for the National Broadband Plan, commented that,
The Video.gov proposal could run afoul of intellectual property laws, so FCC also recommends Congress consider amending copyright legislation to allow public and broadcast media to contribute footage.
This sounds strangely like copyright law is important for the private sector, but as soon as government wants to do something that these laws would get in the way of, then they’ll just change them. Until March 17th, any guesses on exactly what this means are exactly that. Once the report is out we will be able to get a clearer picture of the proposal for Video.gov.
[...] couple of weeks ago, I reported that the national broadband plan would request the creation of a video archival site called [...]
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