Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

["Luis Villa" <luis.villa AT gmail.com>]

On 8/21/06, Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-08-18 at 22:03 -0400, Luis Villa wrote:
> > [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.]
>
> Belatedly I've added you to a list of always accept addresses for
> cc-metadata.  All public Creative Commons lists are set to reject email
> from non-subscribers -- their moderation queues became nearly 100% spam
> at some point.

Oh, suck. Anyway, thanks for fixing.

> > 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.
>
> There wouldn't have been as nobody is putting any CC license info in
> image files, direct or indirect.

But they're claiming CC license on images by uploading to flickr. I
can scan Madonna's book, upload to flickr, and claim it is CC- is
anyone doing that?

> The main problem with use of CC licensed images found on Flickr seems
> lack of attribution (another reason to prefer a reference to the
> copyright holder, not the license, which does not provide attribution).

Urgh, attribution, yeah. Hrm.

> MP3 files found in the wild (meaning not directly downloaded from
> archive.org or similar) that have some sort of CC license indicator in
> embedded metadata -- as far as I can tell, mostly artists that I have no
> reason to think have CC licensed anything.  Just very casual
> observation, no data.

OK. Fair. If it is a real, already occuring problem... well, that just
sucks all around. :/

<discussion of what happens if flickr or other website goes away>
> > Oops, all your data suddenly
> > has no valid license.
>
> No!  A CC license is "valid" for a work because a copyright holder has
> offered it to the public.  [Non-]conformance with a technical
> recommendation for annotating a work with license info does not make a
> license [in]valid.  The best annotations can do is provide additional
> context as to whether a valid offer was made.

But if the only license information is on the web, and not in the file
itself, then I have no way of knowing what the license is. So, you're
right, technically it isn't invalid, but it is useless. :)

(This is again all relative to what I thought your original proposal
was; if I'm arguing with a straw man just let me know and I'll shut
up.)

> I'm not sure how a bare
> license URL would be enough for anyone who actually cares about
> copyright status to feel comfortable using lost and found material.

<shrug> works all the time out here in free software world :) I think
in large part that may be because we tend to have more robust sharing
*communities*, as opposed to floating-off-in-the-ether individuals,
which seems to be more how most CC-related sharing happens right now.
So perhaps you're right that the free software/CC mapping here is not
a good one.

> > > 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.
>
> Good, that's the conclusion I cam to regarding the silly "Copyright ...
> verify at ..." English sentence CC once recommended for MP3/ID3 awhile
> back.

Which seem to be what others in the thread made it sound like mp3/id3
had settled on? I would have assumed you would have signed off on that
:)

Luis