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Lessig and friends launch p2p-politics.org

Christian Crumlish | October 20, 2004 - 11:58am | 2 comments | Email This!

From Lessig's political "spam" message about the new p2p-politics site that is leveraging archive.org to provide an open source for political ads:

The idea of the site is to enable people to send clips - both video and audio - about the candidate they support to people they know, asking them to listen to or watch the ads sent before they vote. These ads can come from the campaigns, or from anyone who wants to make an ad for a campaign. And as this email does, the site permits people to ad text to the message.

We were very successful in collecting ads supporting Kerry. Moveon.org had a bunch licensed under a Creative Commons license we we could get automatically. And the Kerry campaign then gave us a few more to include.

But despite our repeated requests, through many channels, we've not yet been able to get a reply from the Bush campaign.

To send your own ads, or to contribute a clip or remix of your own,
visit the p2p-politics website.

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Comments

Band of Citizens

by camworld on October 20, 2004 - 12:05pm

This idea is similar to the bandofcitizens.org site, where everyday users can submit their own home-made media and advertisements.

The lesson for candidates and campaigns

by Micah L. Sifry on October 20, 2004 - 7:56pm

Two additional sites to add to that list:
Jeff Ubois has a blog called Television Archiving which tracks all sorts of valuable resources in this arena. Friend of Jerry Michalski's, I believe. He made this point about the Jon Stewart video storm:

There are lessons here for television archivists. Easily accessible archives of television news can inform public debate, and make media more accountable. The Stewart clip isn’t available on CNN’s site, or via a traditional archival institution, but is all over net, permanently preserved, and easily accessible. Grassroots, bottom up archiving efforts are clearly viable approach, and split between broadcast and IP TV is starting to become a lot less meaningful.

The lesson for candidates and campaigns, in case it isn't obvious, is that video messages about them are going to spread, whether they like it or not. They'd be smart to make their own available--even to put out some clips that other people can use in remixes--if they want to move with this wave.

While we're on the subject of political advertising, make sure to check out the Living Room Candidate site, which has a beautiful and easily accessible cache of presidential campaign commercials from 1952 to 2004.