Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org>]

On Fri, 2006-08-18 at 20:18 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> > I'd recommend populating it with a URL referencing a page that contains
> > a copyright notice for the embedded file.  I link to a license is nearly
> > worthless -- anyone can add such a link to any image and there is no
> > telling who did it or whether the image is actually licensed.
> 
> So I have to have personal web publishing capabilities if I want to
> embed a license in a file,

Don't even think of it as "embedding a license" in a file.  This is
worthless for the reason noted above.

> even one that (say) isn't public yet, or
> which I currently choose to distribute by methods other than the web?

You don't have to distribute the file via the web to publish a copyright
notice on the web for the file in question.

And "methods other than the web" are just the reason web notice is
necessary.  Anyone could embed a CC license link to any photo (or mp3,
etc) and mail it to anyone.  Is the recipient supposed to believe that
the content is actually CC licensed?  Why?

A web notice gives one the level of assurance that one normally gets
from the web ... as opposed to zero.

> That seems incredibly onerous.

It may be, but if I may repeat myself, embedding a reference to a
license itself is incredibly worthless.

Note that if one really wants to locally reference a specific license
one could use XMP or better yet completely filetype agnostic external
metadata.

-- 
  http://wiki.creativecommons.org/User:Mike_Linksvayer