[cc-community] using Creative Commons as a fig leave

Mike Linksvayer ml at creativecommons.org
Tue Jul 7 00:02:42 EDT 2009


On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 8:27 PM, Giorgos Cheliotis
<gcheliotis.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
> But I'm also thinking that in the long run, as netizens, sharers and
> producers of content, we would all like to have some sort of
> certification authority certifying online services with a 'fair terms'
> seal of approval (or whatever one may call it). Maybe CC can do that
> at some point and earn some revenue from it because the certification
> itself would be valuable to websites hosting content as it would
> provide a guarantee that certain principles are upheld, not only in
> terms of using CC, but also in terms of the TOS, revenue sharing, etc.
> Between us we know that certain websites have better practices than
> others, but this knowledge is not widespread. Similarly to how
> consumer and environmental protection bodies certify products in the
> marketplace so that consumers can more readily assess what they should
> use, we may also need a similar certification process for the youtubes
> and facebooks of this world. This would also decouple such issues from
> the licenses themselves, where the latter are just made available for
> anyone to use, but the certification process aims at helping me decide
> which online video hosting service I should use for my latest
> recording wihtout me having to go through lengthy and complex TOS
> pages every time.
>
> Any thoughts on that?

Lots of people have had the inspiration to map ToSes (and privacy
policies) to "human readable" icons and explanations, and metadata ...
inspired by CC licenses. I think it turns out to be pretty complex,
because as far as I know nobody has gotten very far.  Certifying that
a ToS meets some standard (even if that standard mainly says what a
ToS cannot include) may be more tractable.  Sounds pretty interesting.
But consider this wild speculation on my part.  I do think it would be
incredibly difficult to get adoption of such a certification, and
that's not wild speculation.

Mike


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