I find myself wondering, however, what it would take to extend this effort to other countries of the world. I have a few friends in Canada and in Europe, and speaking with them, I get the impression that the politics of their respective countries are just as susceptible to shenanigans as that of the US. I think someone politically active in say, Sweden, would want to be able to call out his or her leaders for supporting puppy-kicking or baby-eating just as much as someone in the US would.
The biggest limitation we face is simply getting reliable access source material / TV content. In order to count airings of ads in another country we would need access to video streams.
We do have a few international channels in our TV Archive (although we don't use them for the Political TV Ad Archive). We'd love to expand that some day...
a. how the internet archive is building its political archive
b. proving to other cultural heritage institutions that they can get their act together and preserve culture today and make it relevant today
Ok, so Ted Cruz ads are a particular part of culture, but bravo.
I used to work at The New York Public Library's Labs and we had to fight to do anything with anything that wasn't blatantly in the public domain. Meanwhile, one of my colleagues there, Leonard Richardson, would go off and create massive archives like the Minecraft Geological Survey (http://mcgs.crummy.com/#mcgs) in the evenings.
Seriously, we need more folks working in these big organizations that are very good at surviving for more than a hundred years, acting as arks of human culture, that can collect and make useful today's materials. It's just our ability to remember today at stake.
They don't say how political ads sound different from other TV - I guess it works? Or maybe they are just using it to check if they have that ad already like how Shazam works?
We're using the python port of audfprint though: https://github.com/dpwe/audfprint
And yes -- we have a big bucket of known ads, and a big bucket of archived programming, and we're comparing new content with the appropriate buckets.
NOTE: we are talking about ways to release the fingerprints of all the TV we archive so anybody can "search" TV for copies of sounds.
http://www.fec.gov/pages/brochures/notices.shtml#appearance
e.g.
"I'm Ted Cruz and I approve this message"
"This message paid for by the Americans for A Better Tomorrow Tomorrow"
There are very, very few non-political commercials that have this kind of phrasing.
edit: I'm only referring to how political commercials are different from non-political commercials. Obviously, the above heuristic has not much value in determining whether a particular ad is the same one as one already recorded and identified by the Archive.
(https://www.publicintegrity.org/2016/05/12/19677/news-media-...)
The PAC asserts because the ad is a “Web video” they are exempt from the kinds of public disclosures applied to paid political communications broadcast over the airwaves.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/1997/07/12/nyregion/edwin-diamond-a-w...
