Attribution Issue

Rob Myers robmyers at mac.com
Wed May 26 04:32:34 EDT 2004


On Wednesday, May 26, 2004, at 08:00AM, Evan Prodromou <evan at wikitravel.org> wrote:

>Anyways, I think Attribution is probably more analogous to the
>copyright clause in the license, which doesn't seem to get anybody up
>in arms.

BSD attribution is a pain to manage and difficult to keep track of. It is an extra requirement on the user. Content is not software: where do you put people's names on a painting? 

Attribution may be important in Content in a way that it isn't in software because there is no "source" to mark as open*. Identifying the source (the origin) of the content in the actual product may therefore be the best way of ensuring that content can continue to be shared.

Howabout content registries? Go to http://www.contentid.org/ and type in the name of the piece, or an ISBN and a page number, and get the license and contributor details back (all hyperlinked or with details for easy use). You can cross-market this with mobile phone services that allow songs to be identified, or seach engines that allow web pages or book content (like Amazon) to be identified.

- Rob.

* - I appreciate that you can tag electronic media, but this breaks down for performance without watermarking technology. And you can easily strip the tags .



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