Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org>]

On Fri, 2006-08-18 at 20:59 -0400, Rob Litzke wrote:
> Mike -
> 
> I see what you're saying - linking to, say a flickr or archive.org
> page with the original image. This is a great idea, but it doesn't
> really give any idea what the licensing is, especially if one of those
> sites disappears. (Also, if someone wanted to claim false credit for
> an image, all they need to do is upload it to flickr.com and claim
> that way. It still doesn't seem to prove who created the image)

There is at least a possibility that a photo illegitimately posted the
Flickr or another web page can be removed.  

> These are flaws with linking to, say, 
> 
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/


Which there is no possibility of removing and says nothing about the
content at hand.

> which is what I was proposing. I think that the copyright field at
> least needs to say what the license is - "Creative Commons 2.5
> Attribution" or something like that. Otherwise, without access to the
> site there is no way for people to tell what what the license actually
> is. Not that "Creative Commons 2.5 Attribution" is significantly more
> descriptive, but I think it's a step up. Thus it might be a better
> idea to have this in the copyright tag (using your example):
> 
> "http://www.flickr.com/photos/miak/216141670/ (Creative Commons 2.0
> Attribution-ShareAlike)"
> 
> But the problem with this seems, to me, that certain programs might
> not be able to determine the original location. Using ccPublisher as
> an example, if you upload to flickr or archive.org, you can include
> the link. But if you choose local hosting, or simply want to put an
> Exif license in the image, you might be in trouble. Other programs
> could have an even more difficult time. So you'd have to leave that
> out and end up with a non-standard Creative Commons tag. 

Which wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.  No photos have a
"standard CC tag" now and people get by.

> I'm looking forward to your thoughts on this - I don't think there's a
> definite solution, or a solution any better than embedding RDF data in
> an ebook or however else you might show the license for a creative
> commons document. 

In an ebook or similar the human-visible notice is more important.  One
of the things that makes image and sound files special is that there is
no place for human-visible notice.

In any case one can use XMP if one wants to embed RDF in an image.  And
there is specific facility for including a "WebStatement" as well as a
license URL and a sentence, see http://wiki.creativecommons.org/XMP

Mike

p.s. I appreciate your and Luis' criticism on this.  I'm the first to
admit it is fairly loopy.

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