Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

["Luke Hoersten" <luke.hoersten AT gmail.com>]

I'm not really sure where the problem is here. It seems that all of
these questions have already been answered with mp3 licensing as
Nathan has (sort of) stated previously. I think one of the best points
brought forward in this discussion is that CC seems to be higher level
than the GPL. Though it seems that this is the case, the CC is really
two separate levels. The legal licensing side and the
programming/publication side. The legal side is just as low level as
other licenses such as the GPL as long as the basic license claim
requires no computer intervention (which is true at this time for
mp3s):

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

The URI of the license "http://creativecomons.org/licenses/by/2.5/"; is
just there to have an easy and valid way to paraphrase a license. Many
people do the same thing with the GPL in their code (just linking to a
copy of the GPL that they know will be there for a long time). Also in
the GPL, you are encouraged to provide a link, email address, or
legacy mail address so that the user of the code can verify the
license claim or make their best judgement about the validity. CC
licenses work the exact same way. No one has to use the exact format
or every part of the license declaration to make the publication
valid, but, a standard was set up early on to make automatic
verification by programs easier.

As Mike said, licenses are published in viewable places. In audio,
video, and image files, to avoid watermarking or something, the
visible information goes in the info tags.

I realize you probably all already know how all of this works but it
seems that this discussion is kind of a moot point and I feel that all
of the issues being brought up can be addressed by asking the same
question to a GPL evangelist (or asking the question rhetorically) and
examining how the GPL handles it. You must keep in mind that all of
the programming that is done to support the CC is just another higher
level on top that is completely optional.

People follow the GPL because they don't want to risk having legal
action brought against them. Why would this be any different for CC
licensed material?

Luke

On 8/19/06, Nathan R. Yergler <nathan AT creativecommons.org> wrote:
> > 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.
> >
>
> Its probably worth noting that this was our MP3 embedding scheme for a
> while, back when we only used the TCOP ID3 tag for the copyright
> statement.  Assuming you make it a "specification" (i.e., this is the
> text you use, these parts are optional), we were able to split out the
> bits we were interested in with tools like ccLookup just fine.
>
> It's worth noting that the EXIF 2.2 spec gives specific format
> information for the copyright field, and it looks somewhat similar to
> what Mike quoted above.  Perhaps using what they suggest, with the
> license/metadata URI appended?  See page 29 of the spec
> (http://exif.org/specifications.html).
>
> --
> Nathan R. Yergler
> Senior Software Engineer
> Creative Commons
>
> http://wiki.creativecommons.org/User:NathanYergler
> _______________________________________________
> cc-devel mailing list
> cc-devel AT lists.ibiblio.org
> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-devel

--
Luke Hoersten
http://www.openradix.org/
http://www.cs.purdue.edu/~lhoerste/