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Bloggers Fight Fox's Policy On Debate Footage

Fox News is under increasing fire for its decision last week to claim intellectual property rights to presidential debate footage after Republican candidate John McCain used a brief clip in an advertisement.

McCain, a senator from Arizona, defied Fox's request to stop using the clip in his ad, and now a coalition of bloggers and others in the online world and across the political spectrum have joined him in protesting the news stations policy toward debate footage.

"Every other news organization has liberated their debate footage and FOX should either be no different or no longer have the privilege of airing debates," Erick Erickson of the conservative RedState said in a release ironically distributed by the liberal online group MoveOn.org.

Here's a snippet from the story that Andrew Noyes reported for us at Technology Daily last week:

The News Corp.-owned network ordered McCain's team to nix the 30-second spot because the company's policy forbids candidates from using debate clips in political ads. The snippet bears a Fox News logo in the corner of the screen.

The commercial has an excerpt of the GOP debate in which McCain slams Democratic Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York for backing a $1 million set-aside for a museum to commemorate the 1969 Woodstock festival. McCain joked that he was "tied up" as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam while the concert was held.

"The law is very clear," a campaign aide told Technology Daily. "We have the right under the fair-use doctrine to air a small fragment, in this case about 18 seconds of Senator McCain's own comments in a 90-minute public broadcast."

The campaign got a cease-and-desist letter from Fox, but it will continue to air the spot. ... "We're considering filing a lawsuit, but that would give McCain's campaign the oxygen it desperately needs since it's obvious they're running out of money," a Fox spokeswoman said.

After Fox faced criticism for targeting McCain, the company later warned all presidential campaigns against using any debate footage. Fox's policy runs counter to an open policy that CNN adopted for its debates earlier this year. ABC and NBC later adopted similar policies.

Fox's decision to restrict its footage has riled the online world. On Thursday, McCain and the other campaigns found support from the same coalition of bloggers that fought the other television news outlets for free access to debate footage earlier this year. Those blogs include RedState on the right and Daily Kos on the left, according to MoveOn's release.

Jeff Jarvis of PrezVid also has opined against Fox. "[O]ne way to solve this is for all the candidates to pledge that they will not appear on any network’s debate unless that network frees the footage for all candidates and citizens," Jarvis said. "It is, after all, our election."

Posted by Danny | 01:09 PM

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