Barack Obama has reaffirmed the position he took in the primaries and asked the Debate Commission to support "open debates." Here's the letter.Craig "Craigslist" Newmark explains that Lessig led the effort, and that "the idea is to make video footage available to everyone for commenting and reuse, a big deal."
[Barack] wrote last year to the Chairman of my Party: "The Internet has enabled an extraordinary range of citizens to participate in the political dialogue around this election. Much of that participation will take the form of citizen generated content. We, as a Party, should do everything that we can to encourage this participation… I am a strong believer in the importance of copyright, especially in a digital age. But there is no reason that this particular class of content needs the protection. We have incentive enough to debate. The networks have incentive enough to broadcast those debates. Rather than restricting the product of those debates, we should instead make sure that our democracy and citizens have the chance to benefit from them in all the ways that technology makes possible."(via @cnewmark on Twitter)
UPDATE: The McCain campaign has also come out in support of the "open debate" project. My apologies for the earlier omission.
"Pre-emption" is a legal doctrine that says the federal government can claim all regulatory power over an area or subject, barring states from acting on their own. The drug maker Wyeth has brought a case before the Supreme Court arguing that a woman in Vermont, who lost her arm due to a drug complication that Wyeth knew about but did not publicize, cannot sue them in state court because of pre-emption. Wyeth says that 
