Politicizing copyright

In the clip “politicizing copyright” Lawrence Lessig is a guest on a radio show, and he talks about some issues of copyrights and how copyrights are being used in politics. The clip starts out by talking about proposition eight. Proposition eight is a law that is trying to get passed in California that eliminates the right for same sex couples to get married. They talk about how a first grade teacher, who also is a lesbian, brought her class to her wedding as a learning experience. The media got a hold of this and publicized this even to the extreme as people used it as ammunition in the debate over proposition eight. The parents of the children were furious that their children were being used for this political football match and they felt that they have certain rights over whether their children are portrayed in this even or not. Another way that copyrights are showing up in politics is in our presidential campaigns. Both McCain and Obama have been threatened by news networks for replaying some of their material for their presidential campaigns. Lessig talks about how if one were to study presidential elections, copyrights are seen popping up everywhere. He tells us how politicians now a days use copyrights to silence the words of their competitors instead of just responding to them. I guess they see this as a safer way to approach the conflicts that we see so much of when the heat is on between two potential presidential electives. I thought this was interesting because I always assumed that copyrights just dealt with the work of people like their music or art or a book they had written. I think as the dynamics of copyrights change many things around them change as well, politics obviously being one of the effected aspects of our society.