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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: Mon, 21 Aug 2006 23:20:50 -0400

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




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