Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org>]

Let me prefix this by saying I hate embedded metadata and would be happy
if nobody ever included a CC license notice in it but there's a there
there so some people feel a need use embedded metadata to note license
status AND there is a longstanding desire from CC to mitigate against
people adding fraudulent license claims to say madonna.mp3 and having
that be people's introduction to CC ... thus this onerous scheme.  See
discussion on this list probably starting in April 2003, though it is
probably missing context from internal CC discussions.

On Fri, 2006-08-18 at 20:42 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> On 8/18/06, Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org> wrote:
> > A web notice gives one the level of assurance that one normally gets
> > from the web ... as opposed to zero.
> 
> Ah! yes. We raise it from zero to... practically zero :) Seriously,
> this buys no protection against any serious/meaningful attempts at
> fraud, while making it incredibly onerous for the vast, vast majority
> of the population that can't guarantee a permanent web presence.

1. Archive.org, flickr and the like provide permanent web presence for
them.

2. A URI that dies is uncool.  The content musn't have been that
valuable.

> > > That seems incredibly onerous.
> >
> > It may be, but if I may repeat myself, embedding a reference to a
> > license itself is incredibly worthless.
> 
> You're demanding a higher level of accountability with this than with
> any other licensing system I've ever seen. When I publish my code
> under GPL, I don't include a link in the source saying 'this is a link
> to a webpage 'proving' that the code is under GPL', I just do it.
> People publish books under CC all the time which just say 'the license
> is foo', even though PDFs, HTML, and text are all editable- just like
> the exif fields. I'm really not clear why EXIFs, as opposed to any
> other editable content format ever, deserve this special publisher
> burden.

Printed books and code have provide lots of other context by which one
can judge provenance and there's no (or precious little) attempt to make
printed copyright notices or license headers/COPYRIGHT.txt accompanying
code machine readable.

However, an alternative is to make embedded metadata less machine
readable.  The "Copyright" field could include a sentence along the
lines of those discussed on this list long ago, like

        Copyright 2006 Joe Smith licensed to the public under
        http://creativecomons.org/licenses/by/2.5/ verify at
        http://example.com/mypcituressuck.html

And any program that wants to make sense of that (and in other
languages) is more than welcome to.  And someone can leave out any part
if they so wish.




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