Copyrighting the President by Lawrence Lessig

Wired — Copyrighting the President by Lawrence Lessig

Apparently the US corporate media is using copyright threats to prevent a documentary maker from including embarrassing footage of Bush in a re-issue of Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War. Lessig (previously blogged about here.) argues that since a president's public appearances are a matter of public record, and thus not under any copyright, that a president who makes few press conference appearances and who then tacitly, through access games, coerces TV networks into holding onto embarrassign footage, is violating a fundamental tenet of his public service, that his words belong to the public.

Though Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 has grabbed the headlines, another documentary is at the center of this debate. In August, Robert Greenwald will release an updated version of his award-winning film, Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War. Greenwald has added a clip of President George W. Bush's February interview with Tim Russert on Meet the Press, NBC's Sunday morning talk show. In the clip, the president defends his decision to go to war - astonishingly unconvincingly.

Greenwald asked NBC for permission to run the one-minute clip - offering to pay for the right, as he had done for every other clip that appears in the film. NBC said no. The network explained to his agent that the clip is 'not very flattering to the president.' Greenwald included it anyway.

Greenwald plans to use his 'fair use' rights (a tradition of copyright law that says people are free to reasonably use parts of a copyrighted work for the purposes of criticism or study) and ignore NBC's objections. Even though he has the law on his side, it is likely that NBC will try and out-lawyer him and try and set a new precedent though the brute-force legal method. If this happens the next step is literary and film critics being sued for giving bad reviews. I'm quite dismayed at the direction copyright law is headed in both the US and Canada (and creeping across the rest of the world as copyright provisions are made part of trade agreements). Go and read Lessig's Free Culture for the reasons why copyright functions much better as a temporary licence to the creator, and not a perpetual ownership of some idea or work.

The political implications are a separate issue, and on taht all that really needs to be said is that if Bush and his people are so afraid that people might hear him speak again, he's toast. Plain and simple.