Tag: Creative Commons

Categories
Media People

We just hate being contacted

The discussion about copyright, generally, and Creative Commons, specifically is continuing elsewhere, and I’m extremely pleased to see others speak out with their concerns, opinions, and questions.

In particular, I loved what Phil Ringnalda wrote today:

What strikes me as uproariously funny about the rush to CC license weblogs, though, is that probably the most useful feature of licensing something that you don’t mind having people use is the way that they don’t have to ask your permission before they use it. And you know how we all hate having people contact us, with our dozens of comment links and TrackBack URLS and semi-obfuscated email addresses and we-hope-it’s-spam-proof contact forms. I can’t think of anything more horrifying to a weblogger than to have someone contact them out of the blue and say “I liked something you did so well that I would like to use it myself, may I?” Why, I myself have twice had people ask if they could borrow a couple of sentences I wrote, and both times I found it a horrible imposition to have to reply, since I was entirely too busy dancing around the room shouting “someone actually asked to use those two sentences.

At this stage in the Practical RDF book, I needed the laugh this gave me. More importantly though, is that Phil made some excellent points in this posting and in the next one he wrote, where he commented on the confusing and conflicting copyright notices currently on Donna Wentworth’s Corante weblog, Copyfight.

It’s interesting but in regards to this issue, each of seems to have a different focus. Jonathon’s focus in his last posting related to this topic was about his proprietary view of his creative works. AKMA’s is on the length of copyright terms; while my focus, at this time, (and it looks as if Phil’s focus is the same as mine) tends to be on Creative Commons and my concern about people not fully understanding what this means to ‘give away’ what you write in your weblog.

It’s true that no one is forcing any of us to waive all or part of our copyright. But it does seem as if there is a great rush to plunk that CC graphic on one’s weblog, without a clear understanding of the effect of doing so. Unfortunately, there’s been less discussion about the negative impacts of a CC license than there are the glorious positive impacts. This is going to bite some weblogger in the butt someday.

For instance, did you know that you can copy a weblog that’s been donated to the public domain in its entirety, including look and feel, and all content, without having to give attribution? And that you can even charge for this writing?

Quick! Guess who wrote the following:

Bin Laden’s genius is inventing a new form of chess, one where countries are not sides in the contest but squares on the board. As in the game of chess, one must be willing to make unexpected sacrifices, and to know the opponent’s possible moves at least as well as you know your own. As for the rest of the rules, we can only guess. Obviously Muslim countries are all over the board, with Saudi Arabia, home of Mecca, at the center.

It is also obvious that bin Laden knows how to play our side at least as well as he plays his own. Why else would his pawns have been able to hijack four large passenger aircraft in one day and turn them into enormous missle bombs against American landmarks — all with horrifying efficiency?

It is finally safe to assume that right now he has a good idea what we’ll do next. And even if he doesn’t know what his side will do, he does know we won’t expect it.

So: if we kill him, will we have checkmate? Or will his side merely have sacrificed its queen?

Perhaps it will help if we give this game a more appropriate and realistic name — one closer to what bin Laden has in mind.

Let’s call it World War III.

To all intents and purposes, I don’t have to tell you who wrote this. So I won’t. Guess.

Legally I can put this into my weblog, take credit for the words by not attributing the words to another, plunk my own copyright on it, and I can freeze the use of these words where the original author can’t. All I have to do is change a few of the words, just enough to make it a derivation of the original, and therefore an ‘original’ creative work by me.

Is this legal? How do I know, I’m not a lawyer, but we’re being asked to assume some of the responsibilities of being lawyers in order to understand the impacts of the Creative Commons licenses on our weblogs, and other creative works.

Now you tell me that this isn’t a concept and a license and a movement that doesn’t have potential problems. And if you don’t see it then you go right ahead, put that weblog of yours into the public domain. And if you do, then can you send me a link to your weblog? I might need material for my own weblog in the future.

Archived with comments at the Wayback Machine

Categories
Technology

Are the fish spawning?

I had a friend ask me a couple of days ago why it’s taking so long to finish the Practical RDF book. I had to laugh (either that or scream) because to write about something such as Siderean Software’s RDF-based search and navigation product, Seamark, required reading over 100 pages of documentation, not to mention installation of the software and other assorted technical activities just to write — effectively — one section covering this very sophisticated commercial product in Chapter 16. And I’m covering at least five other products in that same chapter.

To write about Inkling/SquishQL in Chapter 11 required that I finally download and install Fink (I’ve been lazy), so that I can easily download and install Readline, so that download and install PostgreSQL, so that I can download and install and try out Inkling/SquishQL on my Mac OS X. And SquishQL isn’t even the primary focus of that chapter.

However, I must focus and get this book finished, if for no other reason than to complete the brainwa…urh, education of Dorothea, who is a reviewer for my book (and an excellent one at that).

Must Stop Weblogging.

However, Jonathon has made this a bit difficult by continuing the discussion about copyright and Creative Commons, because, as he puts it, …I am one of only two people in the whole of Blogaria who accept that writers might wish to exert a degree of control over how their work is used and who also feel no obligation to donate their work to the public domain.

I am the other person Jonathon refers to, but I genuinely do not believe we can be the only two people who want to have some control over how our work is used. We can’t possibly be the only two people who believe this. Can we?

As Jonathon, states, this is a topic worth discussing if for no other reason than to see if there are other fishies swimming against the tide of Creative Commons, Public Domain, and an artist’s rights to their own work as compared to the public’s right to use the work as they will. As he writes:

I believe, and I suspect Burningbird does too, that this is a discussion worth pursuing, not so much because she and I happen to share a contrary view but because the intertwined beliefs “copyright is bad” and “Creative Commons is good” have almost instantaneously become an orthodoxy in Blogaria (to wit, the inclusion of support for Creative Commons licenses in the next version of Movable Type). And orthodoxies are the enemy of free, creative thought.

On this issue, there is an orthodoxy within the weblogging kingdom — a mass movement difficult to swim against; and as my last two posts should demonstrate, I am not one for spawning. There must be more subtle nuances to this issue then the black and white pronouncements of “copyright is evil”, “artists wanting to maintain control of their work are stealing from the public domain”, and “creative control suppresses free speech”.

However, I must get myself back to my work and leave this discussion for Jonathon and others — but I sure would like to hear from those others who believe there is no harm in an artist retaining creative control of their work, and that we can be inspired from artists without deriving from them.

(And as I write this, I can feel the push of the stream against me, and see a million fishy eyes headed directly at me…)

Archived with comments at the Wayback Machine

Categories
Technology Weblogging

The story of the RSS feeds and the little CC license that could

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Again the consideration of exactly what it means to put an RSS feed online has reared its head. Specifically, Mitch Wagner found out that his RSS feed — which includes full posting content not excerpts — was re-published online at LiveJournal. He wrote:

 

That site is my intellectual property. You do not have permission to post the entirety of my weblog to your site. Please take down the site

http://www.livejournal.com/users/mitchwagner/

immediately.

Well, all sorts of interesting commenting occurred, as you can imagine. In particular the implicit assumption that RSS feeds come with ‘tactic approval of republication’ was raised.

What was a surprise is that Mitch reversed himself and now offers a Creative Commons license on his material, though the license information isn’t duplicated in Mitch’s RSS feed directly. Mitch also brings up the ‘commercial’ aspect of re-publishing the material at LiveJournal, and what’s to stop someone from grabbing the content and putting it behind password protected sites that charge money for access.

Easy — don’t publish all your entire posts in your RSS feed. Keep the RSS feeds to excerpts only. Remove the content-encoded field and just leave the description. And adjust your blogging tool to publish excerpts, only. If your weblogging tool doesn’t allow this adjustment, ask the tool builder to provide this capability. The RSS feeds are there to help promote your ideas, not promote their theft. But you have to control the technology, not let the technology control you.

I have a feeling that 2003 is the year when technology and the law will finally find ways to learn to live together, or forever exist in a state of permanent hostility.

(Thanks to Ben for the story.)

Categories
Legal, Laws, and Regs Technology

Common Law

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The text within this weblog posting is licensed under a
Creative Commons License. Please email author notice of re-use as a courtesy.

Denise Howell is our first non-CC lawyer taking a walk on the Creative Commons wild side — she licensed her weblog. I liked Denise’s write-up of the process, including clear details of her mental processes as she made her way through the steps in the application process. She writes:

 

To better convey my intent that the “work” in question is everything I create and post here unless I say otherwise, my notice reads: “Unless otherwise expressly stated, all original material of whatever nature created by Denise M. Howell and included in this weblog and any related pages, including the weblog’s archives, is licensed under a Creative Commons license.” By these revisions, I mean to advise the world that I do not purport to license things appearing here that I did not create (the base HTML template, for example), and also to preserve for myself the right to differently license, or not to license, specific items or posts on a case-by-case basis (I can’t really foresee wanting to do this, but it could happen.

 

In comments attached to the Bombs away! posting, Matt Haughey, creator of MetaFilter and member of the Creative Commons, asked if I was going to license my content now that some of my concerns about the technology implications had been addressed. My initial response was to say No. I did and still do think that there is too much of a rush to adopt the CC licenses without full understanding of consequences. In particular, there is a mix of technical implementation and law that we don’t fully understand, yet, associated with CC licenses.

(When technology and law meet, it’s usually to the detriment of both.)

However, Matt presented some good arguments. In particular, he wrote:

 

Here’s the reality of my situation and why I applied licenes to my work: over the past few years several dozen people have emailed me to request permission for reuse of my photos and essays. I had to answer each one individually, and I’d like to make that automatic for them instead. This way, more people use my creations (since they don’t have to go through the bother of asking first), my name gets out there in more places (with attribution requirements), and wild new creations are made based on my work (since I allow for derivative works). Putting something online and into the world already has lots of risk, but I don’t want to interfere at all with the legitamite reuses of my work, in fact I want to encourage it.

 

Good points. Enough to make me question whether I was being cautious or just plain stubborn in my refusal. My conclusion was a little bit of both.

Because many of my concerns about the legality of CC licenses were allayed by Denise’s writeup, I decided to incorporate CC licenses, gradually, throughout my web sites. starting with this weblog. However, I am doing so a lot more carefully than earlier in the week, when I blithly attached the CC license to the weblog without thinking through the consequences.

Now, I’m taking it by the numbers. License in haste, repent in court.

Bird finds religion

The first major decision I made, in this process of bringing my weblog over to the light, was that I’m not going to license the entire weblog. No offense to the general public, but my look and feel is unique to me; good or bad, this look is mine and says something about ‘me’. My branding if you will. I’m not interested in giving someone permission to copy it wholesale.

(To be honest, I don’t think there’s hordes waiting at the door to grab my site design. and if someone were to take it I probably wouldn’t complain — but I don’t want to encourage anyone to take it. )

Instead of applying a license to the weblog generally, I’m licensing specific components, bit by bit. one component at a time.

Design Components: As regards the pieces of my page design, such as the font settings used for this paragraph, there’s nothing stopping anyone from copying stylesheet settings and layout design for their own use. People don’t need a license to copy individual settings or general layout design. At least, it hasn’t stopped any of us since the second person to design a web page did so by copying and modifying the web pages created by the first.

Hopefully the lawyers in the room will correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that this type of copying would be covered under Fair Use laws, and the CC license wouldn’t be necessary. Or, at the minimum, one wouldn’t be able to distinguish the copied material from original material at a thousand other sites.

Client-side Scripting: In reference to the Javascript in the pages, it’s already covered by a software copyright notice added to the page by Moveable Type. The copyright is owned by Ben and Mena Trott, and I’m required to keep that notice in the pages, unmodified. If I don’t Ben and Mena will hire mean, hungry lawers and come after my butt. Don’t let those nice smiles in those attractive faces, and their demonstrated interest in contributing to the community without compensation fool you — if I removed the script copyright ‘tag’ from the page, there’d probably be a lawyer in my face faster than you can say “Would you like whipped creme with that tort?”

Well, no, not really. I have a feeling that Ben and Mena would take my removal of the copyright information in stride, but I would be betraying my honor and a shared trust if I removed their legal rights from code they created, regardless of the fudgery I might use to do so. And personal honor and trust means a whole lot more to me than a lawsuit. So the notice stays, as is.

As for my own JavaScript, there is none and will never be any in my weblog. The few other places where it’s used, I’ve attached a software license notice to the code allowing full re-use with attribution. (See more on software later.)

Photos:I don’t have the people clamoring for my photos as Matt does (sniff), but I’m willing to release most of the photos for re-publication using the CC license; allowing people to publicly duplicate them for non-commercial use. The photos so released will be licensed as Attribution-NoDerivs-NonCommercial, same as Denise’s weblog. A few photos I’ll keep under the general copyright laws, but chances are if anyone wanted to use these photos I would allow them to. I would just prefer that they ask first on some of the pics.

To handle this, without individual CC licenses sprouting across my pages like fungi on a dead tree, I’m not attaching CC licenses to individual photos appearing in the weblog. Instead, I’ll attach license information to the photos in my photo gallery.

Luckily, the software that I use to manage my photos (Gallery, an open source application managed at Source Forge) allows me to add a caption for each photo. Best of all, I can embed HTML into the caption, which allows me to embed CC license graphic and link to the license in the page, as you can see demonstrated with the St. Louis Arch album.

If the photo software was not capable of accepting user-supplied HTML, I would have included the “This photo is…” text, the license type, and the URL of the license type in the caption, instead.

Flash: I don’t do Flash.

Video:I don’t do video.

Music: I don’t create music files, but will no longer include music in this weblog from other sources that is not freely released for re-duplication.

Other Images I’ll most likely create an image page that lists all the graphics at my sites that I’ll open under the CC license, and link to this from my main burningird.net page. However, I will not license any of my logos, such as the burning bird logo attached to this weblog.

Server-side source code: My source code for my own personal projects is always open source, and I use Source Forge to manage my one bigger project. However, all of my source is covered under software license, and I prefer to continue using software licenses for software. The CC licenses were not initially focused on providing software licensing, primarily because there are software licenses that have been in use, successfully, for years.

As the organization states in its web site, there is a gap in available licenses for other web resource types, such as writing within a web page, images, video clips, and music. Just these will keep the Creative Commons folks busy for many, many years. There’s no need to drag the nice CC people into the murky, Darwinian world of software development.

(One glance at a posting Lawrence Lessig wrote about one specific issue related to software is enough to demonstrate the problems associated with licensing and software.)

XML Vocabularies: All my XML vocabularies (RDF/XML) are open, of course. If they weren’t I would again cover them with the appropriate software or XML-related license.

For my PostCon system, I am adding the CC license information to the RDF/XML used to describe each web resource managed by the system. However, I have modified the CCL RDF/XML to provide a better fit with my RDF/XML vocabulary. This didn’t result in a change to the underlying RDF model — just changed the RDF/XML ‘abbreviated syntax’ used. (Covered in more detail with documentation associated with project, when released.)

Writing: As for the weblog writing, well, this is a bit harder.

My article titles are public domain already, so can’t protect them, (Lawyers, is this true for in-article titles as well as external titles?). And excerpts of the post writing can be re-published under Fair Use laws. As for the text of the entire post, well that’s the thing.

I don’t want someone copying my posts in their entirety; that’s why I don’t support content-encoding of entire posts in my RSS feeds. I prefer another weblog or other site link directly to my posting rather than replicate it; and I prefer that a person visit my weblog to read a posting rather than read it in an aggregator or RSS browser.

The reason why I want people to come here, rather than read my words there, is because the sum of the parts is greater than the whole. My weblog postings are an aggregate of the writing, contained within the weblog look and feel, annotated with updates, and enhanced by communications through trackbacks, comments, and so on.

As an analogy, you can give a child a doll, but there’s a difference between just handing them a doll and handing them a doll contained in a fancy box, wrapped in pretty paper, and tied with a big fat bow with a card attached that has bits of glitter and “Love,____” written on it. Think of my weblog writing as that doll.

I know this stinginess isn’t public spirited, but what can I say? I’m a control freak.

Still, a step or two in the direction of the public good would be a beginning in my quest for self-redemption. Based on this soul searching, I’ve decided to license some of my posts (i.e. allow re-publication of entire weblog text), and leave the others under general copyright.

To allow for this mix of CC licensed posts and non-CC licensed posts, the posts covered by a license will be marked as such, including the graphic hypertexted to the license, and with the RDF/XML embedded within the post. This post shows it at the beginning, but normally the information will be at the end of the post.

If you want to completely republish the writing in a weblog post covered by the license, such as the writing in this post, you can now do so without asking my permission. Well, as long as you don’t alter the words, profit by it (the license is designated as “not for commercial use”), and attribute the writing to me.

As can be seen in the text associated with the license, this license covers the text only. Any photos included in the posting will be covered as described above.

For my other non-licensed posts, you’ll need to get my permission to re-publish or I’ll come after your butt with a mean, hungry lawyer. And I’m not nice, like the Trotts.

RSS: Adding CC licenses to individual posts is going to create a challenge in the RSS feed. For instance, if I don’t put the CC license information at the bottom of the post, it’s all that will show in the RSS feed for this post (since I only do smallish excerpts).

In addition, both RSS feeds I support, Userland RSS (RSS 2.0) and RDF/RSS (RSS 1.0) are generated from templates. These templates process every weblog posting the same. There is no way to designate one posting as licensed and one as not.

Ben Hammersly created a module for RSS 1.0 to embed CC license information for the specific resource in the feed. Now, once this is approved I can modify my RSS feed template to support this. However, this still won’t solve my problem of some posts being released under CC license; and some not.

Another approach would be to depend on the content-encoded element, which I had removed from the RSS feeds. I could allow this back in the feed, and my posting in its entirety would be included in the feed. This should then pass along not only the writing, but the HTML of the posting, including the license.

However, there’s a problem with this — I know of at least one online site, News is Free, that publishes the content from the content-encded element regardless of copyright. If this site, and others like it, don’t check to see that a specific item is covered by the CC license, all of my posts will be published in their entirety. And this includes photos embedded in the posting, which I already covered above (photos in posting are not released CC).

This is one of those tricky things that happens when you start mixing tech and law.

However, there is a short-term solution. Duplicating the CC license information to the feed isn’t required. If a site wants to publish the entire posting, they’ll need to come to the source of the writing, the weblog posting itself. There, they’ll be able to see if the posting is open under CC license or not. Since I only publish excerpts to the RSS feeds, they’ll have to get the entire posting from my weblog pages, anyway.

Until the tools that generate RSS, such as Moveable type, and the tools that re-publish RSS, such as News is Free, incorporate CC license information in their processing, the approach I’ll take for now is to not include CC license information in the feed — a compromise that should work for the nonce.

(Ben Hammersley also nominated me for admittance to the RSS working group. The man’s a brave, brave soul and I thank him. I don’t expect to become part of the group, but it was nice of Ben.)

Summary

There you have it: Burningbird becomes enlightened. However, as you’ve seen, I’ve exercised my enlightment cautiously, treating the CC licenses as they should be treated — as binding, legal contracts between me and the people who would re-use my material.

12/23 Update:

Jonathon Delacour steps into the CCL arena with a professional artist’s eye:

 

What recourse do I have if one or more of these photographs is used in a context of which I disapprove? For example, on a poster advocating euthanasia for terminally-ill infants or in a right-to-life brochure—both published by non-profit organizations.

What’s to stop someone overlaying racist captions on photographs I took in the New Guinea highlands twenty-seven years ago, should I choose to release them under an Attribution-NonCommercial License? Or to include the photographs in a white-supremacist collage? How am I to respond when the pictures I made at a Jewish funeral appear as illustrations in an anti-Semitic diatribe? Not only has my artistic intent been subverted, but I have also allowed myself to be portrayed as a racist or an anti-Semite.

 

Removing the rose colored glasses indeed. Being aware that CC licenses are ‘permanent’ and cannot be revoked is sobering.

Categories
Legal, Laws, and Regs Technology

Bombs Away!

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Pessimists see the world from its dark side — always the glass half empty. They never see that the world can be made better, that problems can be solved. They are not constructive, though they aren’t destructive.

Idealists, on the other hand, only see the light. In their world, the sun always shines (except for that bit of rain needed for the trees), the birds always sing, and humanity exists in harmony. They can be pleasant. They can be exhausting. They can be destructive.

The idealist is destructive where the pessimist isn’t by introducing change without realization of the consequences. They say, “Look at this wonderful thing I have given you!”, but don’t provide the user manual. After you’ve managed to blow up a city block, when you look for the idealist they’ve moved on to another part of the world, to drop yet another idealism bomb on some unsuspecting poor sod.

Idealists. You gotta love em, because if you didn’t you’d want to strangle them.

Where this is all leading is the release this week of the Creative Commons licenses: those digital goodies that one can attach to our creative efforts to let others know if they can use these efforts in defined ways. Collaboration and community, 101. Like our idealist in the earlier scenario, the Creative Commons have dropped this little bomb in our lap, and then left it up to us to determine how to use these things, and what they really mean.

The courts of this land understand copyright law. They have rules and statutes and exceptions and publications and writings and briefs and a host of other stuff too mind numbing to contemplate. However, what it all boils down to is: you created it? You didn’t create this for someone else? Then you own the copyright on it, and all that this means. By default.

So, what if you don’t want to copyright your work? What if you want to provide the work for the good of humanity? How do you let others know that, it’s okay — they can use this work in their own effort?

According to the Creative Commons folks, we attach a CC License to the work that basically offers some of our rights to others. For instance, if I create a work, such as this weblog page, you can duplicate it if I attach a license granting this right; Or a different license might grant you the right to duplicate a post, but only if you don’t publish the material for commercial purposes.

The concept sounds great. It also sounds familiar if you’ve worked with software at all.

In the comp-tech industry we’ve had the ability to attach provisions governing the duplication, modification, and distribution of software for some time. We’ve had the GNU General Public License, the BSD License, the Open Source License and so on. More importantly, we’ve had little trouble understanding what these licenses mean because software source code is a resource that can only be shared in a finite number of ways.

When a license says that source can be used but not distributed, this means that you can use it in your applications, but not if you’re going to be distributing these applications to others. I can use Movable Type but I can’t take the core functionality of MT, such as MT.pm and the other Perl modules, and incorporate these into other applications without first getting formal permission. If a license says that you can distribute the source but must include the original copyright and license information, again, not hard to figure out.

The thing about software and licensing is that the licenses are created specifically for a given resource to meet a given set of parameters. Because of this finite use, interpretation of the license usually isn’t a problem, even with IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer).

The Creative Commons licenses, though, are a different beastie. The concepts are virtually the same — create something and grant rights to the public domain for the betterment of all. As with the software licenses, no one can deny that the concept isn’t grand, and noble, and even necessary if we’re to share in this highly litigous society.

However, the Creative Commons licenses, at least as they’ve been introduced have already caused confusion as to how they’re to be used and implemented. And not only is this not going to help society at large, it could cause additional problems rather than solving existing ones.

An excellent example of the type of confusion that can result is the discussion in the RSS-Dev list about applying CCL to RSS feeds. The CCL information is provided in RDF/XML, which means it can be easily incorporated into other RDF/XML documents. Such as RSS 1.0. Technically, this isn’t complicated and I’ve incorporated it into one one of my RDF/XML-based applications.

However, RSS feeds are nothing more than representations of original material, grouped with other like representational material and meant to be processed by tools for one reason or another. They are not considered to be duplicates of the material — or at least, this is our general understanding of RSS. And general understanding or acceptance or assumption of a thing has legal standing, even in a nitpicky society as ours (lawyers in the office are welcome to correct me on this). XML aspirin.

But is my interpretation of what is an RSS feed really a general understanding? To some, RSS feeds are scraped essence of weblog, without the pretty packaging — true representations of the ‘weblog content’. When a CCL is included within the feed and pointed to the original source, does this mean that the RSS feed itself remains at full copyright? Or does the copyright also apply to the feed?

If the CCL is attached to the feed itself, does this mean that tools must now honor this information and check the license to determine if it can be duplicated? Does the license have to be duplicated in addition to the feed? What about cases where the copyright in an RSS file differs from the one in the source — which applies? I asked this at the discussion group and someone thought the two licenses would be ANDed together, which means that the rules would be merged and interpreted as one license. This answer, to me, represents much of the danger with CC licenses — we see them and interpret them as a technology because of the format of the RDF/XML to describe them, but we don’t understand the legality of the resulting actions.

It doesn’t take a lawyer to see that two licenses that conflict in specific grants are going to increase the confusion as to use of the source, rather than decrease it. More so than exists without a CCL.

With RSS feeds is there is a kind of implied consent associated with the feed. If you didn’t want the feed to be consumed, you wouldn’t produce it and you won’t leave it where it could be accessed. A variation on you can’t complain if people look in to your living room when you leave the drapes open.

This is no different than the implied consent with web pages. You put content on the web to be viewed, and unless you password protect the pages, they’re open for viewing by all.

You there! Did you know that this page is copyrighted? Well, it is! Did I give you permission to read this page? Well, did I?

You’re still reading. Did I give you permission to continue reading? Well?

Dammit, you’re still reading!

See what I mean by implicit consent? By putting this page online, I’m granting you the implicit right to read it, and other laws, such as Fair Use, give you the right to pick juicy parts out and duplicate these to your weblogs for your own posts. A very workable system. Until now.

The problems with Net accessible resources has little to do with material stored as text and structured with markup of some form and all to do with resources based in other formats. Formats such as images, video, and music. Especially music. When can I copy a music file and put it on my site? When can I distribute it? Can I alter it?

These are the types of resources that appear in the news and cause a great deal of havoc. These are the resources that Creative Commons Licenses were meant to be applied to — as a signal to others that this photograph, video, MP3 file, or writing (as separate from web page formatting) can be duplicated, or modified, or distributed and no one’s going to come after your butt with a mean, hungry legal person.

The confustion about CC Licenses occurs not because we don’t understand the intent behind the licenses, but because we don’t understand how to interpret the use of the licenses. This is no different than any other aspect of law.

By provided RDF/XML to desribe the license, the Creative Commons opened the door to including license information in any document formatted with markup, regardless of the appropriateness of the action, and our understanding of such actions. Such as in RSS feeds. Like this web page. Even extending to software, as Jon Udell demonstrated with his LibraryLookup functionality. Looking closer at Jon’s use of the CCL, a question arises as to what exactly Jon is covering in the license: is it the LibraryLookup function? Or the contents of the web page where the license is embedded? This can’t be understood just by the fact that the license is embedded in the same HTML page as the desciption of LibraryLookup.

My CCL embedded in this page doesn’t provide answers as to whether I’m granting the rights described in the license to the writing in this post, or to the page in its entirety (formatting and all) or even to the style sheet and layout used. I’ve not provided clear information as to what the license covers. What’s worse, guess wrong and you’ve violated my copyright. And I’ll come after your butt with a mean, hungry lawyer. (Nah. Not really.)

We’re just as likely to include the XML first, and ask why later. And weblogging only propagates this with its ‘meme of the minute’ adaption of anything ‘new’. After all, the RDF/XML doesn’t prevent the page from validating And the license information validates in RSS, as well. Legally, this and a 252.25 will buy you an hour with a lawyer and a cup of coffee.

Sam thinks the Creative Commons licenses are genius. I disagree. By releasing these licenses without providing more detailed understanding of how they work (other than a nifty little Flash movie, a lot of grand words about sharing and the greater good, and links to other indirectly related material), and by releasing license information in an XML format almost guaranteeing that the licenses will be attached to documents formatted with XML, regardless of fit or not, the Creative Commons has released a bomb on the idealists among us. Let’s just hope they don’t walk away and leave us to blow ourselves up.

Update

From Lessig’s weblog (Lawrence Lessig is the chairman of the Creative Commons):

 

Matt Croydon wonders about how CC licenses will interact with software. The answer is that they won’t. We share RMS’s concern that there is a proliferation of licenses in software. Our view was that there was a dearth for other creative content. Thus we start outside the software world. For now, at least.

 

Question for Lessig et al: Define software? And where does something like RSS fit into this?

Second Update

Lawrence Lessig modified his original post, which now says:

 

Matt Croydon wonders about how CC licenses will interact with software. In a careless earlier version of this, I said they won’t. Sam Ruby suggests the most I could mean by that is that our energy will be directed elsewhere. Indeed, that’s the most I mean. We share RMS’s concern that there is a proliferation of licenses in software. And our view was that there was a dearth for other creative content. Thus we start outside the software world. But creative reuse of creative content is what CC is all about. My apologies for any confusion.

 

He also made a brief comment in his weblog to our questions:

 

Great questions all, and I’m sorry I wasn’t clear before. We don’t mean to forbid the use with software. We just didn’t write the licenses with software in mind. But if the license fits, wear it. Obviously, adding this into RSS is a critically useful adaptation, and we encourage it.

 

I wrote (correcting my usual burningbirdisms):

 

Appreciate your additional, comment but unfortunately, this raises more questions.

In a post I wrote on this (at http://weblog.burningbird.net/fires/000766.htm ), I brought up the fact that, for weblogs at least, individual posts could have different licenses attached, granting each different rights as to republication.

However, RSS feeds are template based and automated. So the RSS template would be setup to grant public domain access to the text of an entry, automatically, but the actual entry itself may be much more restrictive.

A person republishing the text does so based on the license in the RSS feeds, which is counter to the intent of the person who wrote the text.

Can you not see the potential problems of this in court? In fact, couldn’t this open up the door for potential lawsuits against the tool maker as well as the person who re-published the work? (Worst case scenario.)

Additionally, you say it’s a critically useful adapation. Why? Saying so on your part doesn’t explain to us why this is so, and this type of explanation could help us understand how to effectively apply license in other circumstances.

And you also say the CC encourages incorporation of license data into RSS feeds. Why?

I know there’s discussion about being able to search on this license information on the web, looking for public domain material. However, this seems a case of putting the reuse capability before the content.

Wouldn’t one search for content first, and then look at license? And the license would be attached to the content.

Also, RSS feeds have no persistence. An item rolls off the feed just as quickly as it rolls on. RSS feeds really wouldn’t be effective sources of persistent data for future discovery.

I’m sorry, and I appreciate your answer. But all you’ve done is raise more questions.

 

I did find L. Lessig’s response to be disappointing. He says one moment that CC licenses are not for software, and then the next says, sure, if it fits use it. This makes me hesitate to use the CC licenses more rather than less.

Isn’t trapping inconsistencies something we take pride of in weblogging? And isn’t this turn-about inconsistent? And even more confusing?

As has been said elsewhere — we have software licenses carefully crafted for the industry. I can see no reason at all why one would use the CC license, admittedly not crafted for the industry, in place of ones that have been used for years, with success, and that are specifically for the industry. Doing so, just to do so is ludicrous. Forward motion for the sake of forward motion.

As for the RSS, issue — this only strengthens my opinion that licenses should not be used in RSS feeds. If the reason is to duplicate the license attached for a posting, then this will fail because RSS templates and tools act on all items in a RSS feed, not individual ones. The license attached to the individual posting may end up being different than the license attached to the RSS item.

Additionally, if the purpose of adding license information to the entry is so that a site, interested in republishing the item in total doesn’t have to return to the original source, I can’t see benefit. Not one that overcomes the confusion about implementation (i.e. in RSS 2.0, CC licenses can be applied to the ‘channel’ as well as individual entries — and exactly what does this mean? That one can republish the entire page of postings?)

And if a person does republish an entry from a posting, they are required by the CC license to also republish the license. This means that all aggregators that publicly publish their results (meerkat, news is free and so on) will have to duplicate the license info with the entry.

The CC site states that one reason we would include the RDF/XML with a resource to be shared is to allow one to search the web for public domain resources. But this makes little sense. Wouldn’t one search for specific content, and then check the license? Regardless, how would the RSS feed participate in this? The items contained in the feeds fall off the feed as quickly as they enter it.

I raise these questions here rather than at the RSS-dev discussion lists, primarily because I’ve been shut down in this debate twice on that list. I won’t try for ‘third time’s the charm’.

One can debate the validity of my questions. But mine won’t be the only questions, or comments, or concerns. There needs to be a mechanism that allows public debate on the CC products, and one that is promoted at the highest level of the CC website.

I appreciate what the Creative Commons folks are trying to do. And I don’t fault the intent. However, I think that the execution of same requires an interactive element that doesn’t exist at the moment. And this will ultimately damage the credibility of both the CC and the CC licenses. IMHO.

Final Update

Sam has also interjected a note, based in comments attached to his posting when I repeated what I said here, in response to his posting. I think his reply, and my response to his reply says all I need to say in regards to the “Coders Only Club”.

Exclusion based on membership has never appealed to me. Whether it’s based on race, gender, religion…or technology and applications thereof.

And one should be able to express opinions about CC licenses, and RSS, and other technologies without having to join the COC club.