The blogs are abuzz this morning with the news that CNN has decided to allow unrestricted reuse of the televised New Hampshire presidential primary debates. It's the right thing to do for all sorts of reasons. Much of the commentary repeats the claim that CNN is releasing the video under a Creative Commons license, but the announcement makes no such claim, rather using the language "without restrictions."
Both John Edwards and Barack Obama previously had asked that future debates be licensed under a Creative Commons license, apparently reacting to (MS)NBC's hoarding of video from the South Carolina debate of Democratic contenders.
The problem with Creative Commons is that it isn't a license, but rather a confusing family of related licenses, some of which have ill-defined restrictions -- notably "noncommercial." In this world in which everyone can be a publisher, and everyone can paste ad-network code into a website template, what is commercial and what is not? "No restrictions" is much a better policy for the debate video.