Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

["Luis Villa" <luis AT tieguy.org>]

As background, I *am* a GPL evangelist, have been releasing code under
GPL since 1998, and have been involved in the GPL v3 process, though
sadly not as much as I'd like. There is almost certainly GPL content
out there with my name on it which points at my college dorm website
which no longer exists.

On 8/19/06, Luke Hoersten <luke.hoersten AT gmail.com> wrote:
> 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 was not involved with those discussions- I apologize if I'm
substantially rehashing discussions that were already had there. That
said, if the decision there was to make it impossible to determine the
license without there being a public posting of the license, for all
the reasons I've stated I think it's a bad decision and should be
reconsidered.

That said, what Mike seemed to originally be arguing for, and what I
think is a very, very bad idea (impossible to determine license
without going online), and what you and Nathan appear to be arguing
for (license information available offline, with /optional/
verification online) are different things; the second I have no
objection to and in fact sounds like a great idea. So which is it? :)

Luis

> 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?

That's not the primary motivation for using GPL; arguably not in the
top five. Either way, I'm not sure what bearing it has

> 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/
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