October 20, 2006
Jeff Ubois on Erasing Televised History, Copyright-style

Remember Dan Quayle's attack on fictional character Murphy Brown? Well if you don't, or want to refresh your recollection of the 1992 episode, you'll have to rely on secondary sources, Jeff Ubois reports.

Due in part to the vagaries of copyright and contract, public access to the televised part of our historical record is severely limited. Ubois, while a Berkeley researcher, was able to get almost none of the audiovisual material documenting the Quayle speech, the TV coverage, or Murphy Brown's response. He's just published a paper on the project: "Finding Murphy Brown: How accessible are historic television broadcasts?" with the Journal of Digital Information.

In a Kafkaesque twist, Ubois was almost unable to publish the paper as he wanted because a different journal insisted he needed copyright permissions from the correspondents whose refusal of permission he wanted to document! From his blog:

Copyright restrictions ultimately made it impossible to get the original Dan Quayle speech, or the Murphy Brown episodes in question. In an odd coda to this project, one digital library journal (from which I withdrew this paper) insisted that the correspondence detailing refusals by various organizations to allow access to or use of the Quayle/Brown footage was itself copyrighted, and therefore unsuitable for publication. Those excerpts are included in the current piece. It was disturbing how one effect of copyright law is to chill academic discussions of copyright law.

Posted by Wendy at 03:58 PM