I’m struck by the contrast in two stories appearing in today’s news
NHK, Japan’s public broadcasting network, is coming under pressure to start putting video content online (albeit for a fee). While in my country, C-Span, the non-profit network “created by cable, offered as a public service,” asked that videos of Colbert’s White House Correspondents Diner speech be removed from YouTube.com (and later agreed to have the material hosted on Google Video).
I’ll admit, the comparison doesn’t totally gel. NHK requires viewers to pay a subscription fee, and would likely do the same for videos on the Net. C-Span is funded through cable subscription fees. Yet both networks seem to have some element of both publicness and privateness to what they do; both are involved in the creation of cultural (and democratic) artifacts.
Without getting in to what is the “right” thing for either to do, what is interesting to me is the drive people feel to share this sort of material. If the amount of Japanese language videos on YouTube is any indication, there is truly interest in sharing this content across cultures. As with many of the other things I blog about, it comes down to a question of control. Is there any sort of public ownership right in content produced by government (directly, by subsidy, or otherwise)?