No matter our views about the Israeli bloody war* terrorism against the Palestinian people, Al Jazeera can teach us some lessons about openness and information democracy: its broadcast-quality video footage shot in Gaza is released under the least restrictive Attribution license.
Quoting the CC’ blog:
Each professionally recorded video has a detailed information page and is hosted on blip.tv allowing for easy downloads of the original files and integration into Miro. The value of this footage is best described by an International Herald Tribune/New York Times article describing the release:
In a conflict where the Western news media have been largely prevented from reporting from Gaza because of restrictions imposed by the Israeli military, Al Jazeera has had a distinct advantage. It was already there.
More importantly, the permissive CC-BY license means that the footage can be used by anyone including, rival broadcasters, documentary makers, and bloggers, so long as Al Jazeera is credited.
There’s more information over at Al Jazeera’s CC repository, and in our press release. You can also add the Al Jazeera repository to your Miro feeds by clicking here
So, rather than labeling its unique original footage as “exclusive”, the Arabian network is giving it away for anyone (competitors included) to watch, analyze, share and reuse, leveraging an open source (GPL) open media platform and hosting it on an open source (GPL) CMS.
What do you think?





