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

Giorgos Cheliotis gcheliotis.lists at gmail.com
Tue Jul 7 00:30:56 EDT 2009


Sure this might not work for all and some sites may never qualify for  
a 'gold standard' of 'fair terms' but oen could try to create a silver  
and bronze standard as well and maybe youtube would only get bronze,  
maybe tribe of noize only silver, just saying... in any case,  
something like this would help those who care identify the websites  
that are trying to be fairer to their users and maybe boost their  
traffic at the expense of those with more unfair TOS. Of course doing  
this would not be so simple, it would require some funding and the  
creation of an independent, consumer-oriented body for that purpose.  
Ideally this should be done in cooperation with the sites hosting the  
content, so that they may wear their golden or whatever badge on their  
pages, but it can also be done on a separate site, which, given enough  
visibility, will help inform users of social media sites and  
indirectly help exert pressure on those whose TOS do not meet certain  
standards.


On Jul 7, 2009, at 12:02 AM, Mike Linksvayer wrote:

> 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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