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cc-devel - Re: [cc-devel] Exif metadata

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Subject: Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

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  • From: "Luis Villa" <luis.villa AT gmail.com>
  • To: "Mike Linksvayer" <ml AT creativecommons.org>
  • Cc: cc-devel AT lists.ibiblio.org, discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work <cc-metadata AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-devel] Exif metadata
  • Date: Fri, 18 Aug 2006 22:03:50 -0400

[I'm not on cc-metadata, and it is deleting all my mail instead of
holding it for moderation, FWIW, which may explain some of my missing
context.]

On 8/18/06, Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org> wrote:
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.

Hrm. Interesting problem, but the reaction to it smells like premature
optimisation to me. Now that wide-scale CC-enabled services like
flickr have existed for a couple years, do we have any examples of
this happening on any wide scale? I've never seen or heard an example
of it, but I've certainly not been paying wide attention to it. My gut
feeling is that this would be a rare problem, and the best way to
counter it would be to radically lower the barrier to tagging with
correct metadata- drown out the bad data (if any) with a stream of
good.

I might note that if you go with the 'simple' license URL, and the
problem of false re-licensing becomes really bad, the worst case
scenario is that you deprecate using the straight license URL and
require publication. That cost seems much preferable to raising high
barriers before the license standard is a success.

See
discussion on this list probably starting in April 2003, though it is
probably missing context from internal CC discussions.

<nod>

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.

It's still a barrier to entry; worse, phrased that way, it is a
barrier to entry *and* lockin to platforms that users don't control.
Flickr changes their URL scheme slightly? Oops, all your data suddenly
has no valid license.

CC could perhaps resolve this problem by offering a web-facing central
license registry, much like the PTO does. This could even integrate a
basic license validation service- allow the metadata-reader to pass a
checksum of the image to the web service, and use that to verify the
work. I'd much rather trust CC as a license data repository than any
other third party.

2. A URI that dies is uncool.

Yes.

The content musn't have been that
valuable.

No.

Email addresses that die are uncool; arguably worse than URIs that die
(because they are the RI for a *person*, not just data) and yet out in
the real world they happen. The never-ending, never-moving URI is a
very nice luxury that the digital elite have, but I'd wager it isn't
very common for most people.

And even if you disagree with that analysis, the goal is to have *lots
of people* licensing *lots of content*- not only "valuable" content.
If Free Software licenses vanished into the ether, we'd be a lot
poorer- stumbling across old code somewhere that no longer has a home,
and finding it a new home, is one of the little things that helps free
software succeed; CC should learn from that.

(Tangentially, isn't one of Lessig's key policy goals that we should
make it easier to find out copyright status of old materials, not
harder?)

> > > 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

Surely madonna fans can tell the provenance of a madonna song, if that
is the concern?

I do see the point, in the other response, that images and music are
different from text/code, in that there is no way to express the
license 'up front'. If anything, though, it feels to me that this is a
good reason to make machine-readable metadata

and there's no (or precious little) attempt to make
printed copyright notices or license headers/COPYRIGHT.txt accompanying
code machine readable.

Which is a mistake, but tangential to this discussion :)

However, an alternative is to make embedded metadata less machine
readable.

Nonono! Machine-readable licenses lower the barrier to remix and
reuse- which should be a critical goal for CC.

Luis




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