Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Jon Phillips <jon AT rejon.org>]

On Thu, 2007-09-13 at 23:33 +1000, Peter Miller wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-09-12 at 21:49 -0700, Jon Phillips wrote: 
> > Cool...Peter, what are you thinking now?
> 
> I think I'll commit the patch as is.  It rounds out the API nicely, and
> doesn't seem to get anybody's dander up.
> 
> 
> At the risk of confusing things with more than one issue per email, here
> are the immediate things I'd like to do:
> 
> (1) in liblicense
> 
> I've been looking at implementing my "license intersection" function.
> It seems straight forward, now that I'm more familiar with the code.  
> 
> But this raises a problem: what if the intersection is the empty set?
> I.e. no rights at all.  Is there scope for come kind of "on the fly"
> license URI that can be queried via the API, etc, but never actually
> exists as a URL you could view with a web browser, as you can for CC
> attributes URIs and rights URIs.  (Probably the same thing: what if the
> intersection of the permitted rights is valid but isn't a CC license
> combination?)

In the UI for liblicense in gnome we accounted for this with a
warning...really we should put this onto the user...otherwise, if there
is some problem with the license selection, IMO, we shouldn't set a
license...other thoughts of how to do this in the raw liblicense? Jason
and Scott, you guys might have already done this...

> (2) in icon-compositor
> 
> In trying to be a conscientious web citizen, I want to be able to
> display copyright notices with icons, as well as the license.
> 
> But this raises a problem: there is no place to host copyright
> information within liblicense.  This concerns me because I could wind up
> with not one but *two* files alongside each image: the one for the
> license information, and the one for the copyright information.
> 
> It gets worse: when I need to say "(C) me, derived from a work (C) Fred
> Bloggs" how do I?  We don't have this problem in source code, we just
> add our notice to the list in the header comment, right next to the
> license comment.  They belong together in source code - shouldn't they
> belong together in images?

Could you propose a solution to what you are saying...licenses require
copyright, so that is implied...but are you talking a more precise
copyright date too?

> 
> 
> One more thing: I feel that the CC site (http://creativecommons.org/ns)
> is very unclear on the difference between reproduction and distribution.
> Is distribution == reproduction * N, where n > 0 or n > 1 or n > 42
> or ...?  Surely I can make as many copies on my laptop as I like, or is
> there a problem there, too?  Is distribution different than
> reproduction?  Is distribution different than publication?  I.e. giving
> a copy to someone vs making available to world on web site (the
> difference between personally handing out fliers vs leaving them on a
> table for people to pick up as they walk past).  I've been wrestling
> with copyright for too many decades to be happy with the nebulous
> wording at the CC web site (and, yes, I get it that the answer varies by
> jurisdiction, I just feel the words could be much much less vague).

Yes, this is the tangled web of copyright...I would suggest to copy and
paste this block onto the cc-licenses and cc-community list to help get
more clarity...the above has much to do with legal precedent and various
legal tests that *could* be applied...at the end of the day this
discussion gets into a discussion about being a copyright minimalist or
maximalist, and is tough once you get into mandating it through code...I
think a good middle path is due!

Cheers!

Jon

> 
> Regards
> Peter Miller <millerp AT canb.auug.org.au>
> /\/\*        http://miller.emu.id.au/pmiller/
> 
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-- 
Jon Phillips

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