[cc-community] Digital timestamping CC?
Rob Myers
robmyers at mac.com
Mon Sep 6 07:26:35 EDT 2004
On Monday, September 06, 2004, at 11:58AM, <jose+cc at w3.org> wrote:
>Sorry if I am not using the current legal terms. I was thinking about
>putting some of my music compositions under CC.
I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, I'm not that familiar with music publishing.
>While talking with another musician, he noted out that as there
>was no registration process, using CC wouldn't protect my compositions.
>Anyone could take them and register them at the existing music copyright
>organizations (SACEM in France, ASCAP in the USA, ...) under their name.
CC uses copyright to protect work; the CC licenses are copyright licenses. If you are concerned about proving when your work was produced, you can still register the copyright with the US copyright office if you're in the US.
If someone registers your work elsewhere (is this common?), they are infringing copyright (and your paternity right under Berne IIRC), the same as if they copied your work normally.
It would be interesting to have copyright organisations for music and images (eg DACS) involved in policing a "spectrum of rights". So getting money for all rights reserved work, making sure sharealike is applied properly, etc. I don't know how that would be financed, but it's definitely needed.
>In a nutshell, using CC alone doesn't seem to constitue enough proof
>as to when a piece of work was registrered. For example, I could predate
>one composition and put it under CC.
CC isn't really "registering" work. It's a license, rather than a licensing scheme. If you need proof of ownership of your work then all the traditional methods still work, and putting it somewhere public on the web where a search engine (or the Wayback Machine) will find it, or posting it to a newsgroup, are good new methods.
>A possible solution to this issue could be to have an XML digital
>signature timestamp process that could bind the CC RDF license, to the
>piece of work. As the signature is done over a hash of the bits that
>constitute the digital work, you have a good proof of when you registrered
>your work and can use it to solve conflicts.
Would derivatives be required to add their own timestamps? Since it isn't DRM it's not disallowed under the CC license, and could be useful. How would derived and aggregate works handle this, though?
>Has anyone given thought about applying this kind of timestamping digital
>signature service to CC?
There's a cc-metadata list that might know more about this sort of thing. It does sound interesting.
- Rob.
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