By AMY HARDER
A broad coalition of digital advocacy groups and individuals, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, MoveOn.org's Eli Pariser and Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig, are applauding Barack Obama's stated commitment to open government and suggesting ways he can show that commitment further.
In a new Web site that went up Tuesday, the groups lay out three principles they hope the incoming administration will follow. Obama's transition team pre-emptively agreed to the first one by announcing Monday that its Web site, change.gov, will implement a new copyright policy -- the Creative Commons License -- that allows for more widespread use of its content.
Lessig applauded the move Monday on his blog. The Stanford professor, representing the group Change Congress, is spearheading the coalition's effort along with Mozilla and the Participatory Culture Foundation. The groups have had a "back channel back-and-forth" with the new administration, and the new Web site could serve as a way to allow more public input, he said.
"Nobody knows exactly the best way to do this right now," he said. "So
that calls for this kind of ongoing discussion, both inside and outside
of the administration."
Lessig and company hope the incoming administration will agree to post videos onto sites other than just YouTube, such as blip.TV, so users can more easily download them. YouTube currently doesn't actively promote downloading. The administration got rid of the legal barrier by switching to the new copyright policy, and now it needs to get rid of the technological barrier, Lessig said. The group's letter also called upon the president-elect to make sure that all information, such as video of a press conference, for example, is made available to all media (whether it's broadcast TV or the Internet) equally. This ensures fair competition, Lessig said.
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