Today comes news that, effective immediately, C-SPAN footage of any event sponsored by Congress and any federal agency — which the network estimates to be about half of its programming — will be released under a Creative Commons non-commercial/with attribution license. If you’re unfamiliar with it, Creative Commons is something of an alternative to the traditional all-rights-reserved copyright regime. What it does is allow the person who thinks up a creative work to say, hey, I’d only like to assert some of the rights granted to me. It’s sort of like a Chinese-menu approach to controlling creative content. So what C-SPAN has done today is to decide that as long as two important conditions are met — (1) C-SPAN gets credit, and (2) no money is made off of their work — this footage is free to be used far and wide.

It’s important to remember that, when it comes to C-SPAN, we’re really talking about two kinds of content. One is the “official events” mentioned above — that’s the stuff recorded by C-SPAN-owned cameras. This includes congressional hearings, press briefings, that sort of thing. What’s still a bit unclear today is whether the rules of the game have changed at all for the coverage of the House and Senate floor that C-SPAN also distributes. As we’ve talked about before, what C-SPAN is doing there is packaging and branding the public domain feed shot by government-owned cameras. More clarity on that content would indeed still be welcomed.

All in all, today’s news is fairly remarkable. The dust-up between Speaker Pelosi and the House Republican study group that raised attention on C-SPAN’s control issues occurred just three weeks ago tomorrow. The concerted push to comport C-SPAN’s policies with the modern use of online video only really ramped up in the last two weeks. What does that mean for the Open House Project? Only good things, I think. Seems as if this is a propitious time to be in the open-government business.