David Goldstein gets an email from TVW, stating they’re trying to enforce their social media unfriendly copyright.

Which totally reminds me of something.

Before she left TVW, I had a fascinating email exchange with their former president Cindy Cindy Zehnder, talking about social media. I encouraged the network to think more broadly in terms of their copyright and how people could use their material.

Right now, if you aren’t bona fide media (whatever the hell that means) you can’t touch their material aside from just linking to it. That doesn’t mean that people don’t (I do it every once in awhile), but I’m wondering when they stopped thinking about it.

Last fall, as part of the TVW board’s process to write their 5-year strategic, they brought together a group of media folks in early September to talk about this very issue. I emailed the organizer of the focus group to see what happened during the discussion.

Zehnder left right after that meeting to become the governor’s chief of staff, so I’m assuming the 5-year strategic plan process hit a road bump.

The new president, Greg Lane, only came on board in late April, so here’s hoping they start thinking hard about this. And, that the Goldstein incident is only a bump along the road. TVW is too valuable a resource for citizens to keep it locked up.

Here’s the funny part, Lane has already made a point of saying he wants to change the focus of TVW to engagement:

“The second part of the mission is to really engage the public, to get them to participate in the process. And that’s where we want to shift the focus,” he said.

Engagement isn’t sitting back in your chair passively taking in (through t.v. or internet) what TVW has to offer.

Engagement is taking what TVW has and remixing it, editing it, for discussion and commentary. Exactly what Goldstein did.

Also on TVW:
How to embed TVW content onto your blog
Small victory of the day, flash embed of TVW content
Terry Thompson doesn’t know blogs
Dog as Partner Episode