Internet Vets for Truth

I make an active effort to avoid discussing politics on my site. Like religion, political convictions are deeply-held, highly personal, and nearly impossible to persuade.

That said, I’d like to point you to Internet Veterans for Truth’s “Never Forget”, an election-related campaign that launched a few minutes ago. They’re featuring tons of documentary video highlighting the records of both George W. Bush and John Kerry.

Regardless of your political leanings, I’m impressed by this new form of political protest. This group of computer geeks (and close friends) is expressing themselves in the way they know best: by making information as freely available as possible.

They’ve collected hundreds of megabytes of video, all available for instant streaming over five ten 100Mbit lines. (For those less technical, this is an absolutely staggering amount of bandwidth.) In addition to streaming over http, all of the clips are also available from their BitTorrent server. (Including one 260MB torrent of every video.)

This reminds me of Marc Perkel, who rented a $2000 server for the month to serve high-quality downloads of Fahrenheit 9/11, but taken to the next level. (I wouldn’t be surprised to see several documentaries hosted in their entirety by the weekend.)

The copyright issues are interesting… Almost all the video is under copyright, but because it’s being moderated and used as a form of protest, it’s being turned into political speech. I doubt a free speech/fair use argument would fly in court, but more importantly, I don’t think the copyright holders will care in the days leading up to the election.

October 30, 2004: They added complete, high-quality versions of Fahrenheit 9/11 and Going Upriver, ready for streaming or download. This is an unprecedented move.