Bush Ad Excerpt Rankles NBC News

A portion of President Bush’s Sunday interview on “Meet the Press” was used by his reelection campaign Tuesday and included in an ad-style video message distributed on the Internet, drawing an immediate protest from NBC News.

The video, promoting Bush’s foreign policy initiatives, was posted on the campaign’s website and e-mailed to about 6 million supporters. Set to inspirational music and ending with a girl running through a grassy field, it included a lengthy quote from the Sunday talk show. In part of it, the president said, “I’ve got a foreign policy that is one that believes America has a responsibility in this world to lead.”

After some back-and-forth by lawyers for the campaign and NBC News, the video was removed from the website around 5 p.m. PST. Bush campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel said, “While it was entirely legal and appropriate under ‘fair use’ guidelines to share parts of Sunday’s interview with our supporters, we respect NBC’s wishes and are working to remove the Web video.”

NBC News spokeswoman Barbara Levin said the network protested the use of the interview because “it’s not our purpose to create materials that political campaigns can use in their advertising.”

Campaigns often include excerpts of interviews on their websites, without the media complaining.

Under U.S. copyright law, the doctrine of “fair use” allows the reproduction of material, subject to some limits, for criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship and research.

The U.S. Copyright Office’s website says that the “distinction between ‘fair use’ and infringement may be unclear and not easily defined.”

NBC News said this situation was different. “This promotional video is set to music, edited for impact, and mixed with other images, graphics and footage unrelated to the interview,” it said in a statement.

“NBC News did not, and does not, authorize this misuse of our copyrighted material. As a news interview program, ‘Meet the Press’ takes very seriously the unauthorized use of its content for partisan political purposes. We have asked the campaign to cease and desist immediately from the use of our material.”

A Bush campaign official said, “We feel this was a good middle ground. We sent it out to 6 million people, and it was on our site for a number of hours, but we removed it out of respect for our friends at NBC.”