Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org>]

On Thu, 2005-11-24 at 14:40 -0500, drew Roberts wrote:
> Would it be better just to make it easy for people to notify you and to 
> perhaps provide some incentive for them to do so?

Yes.  And this requires zero legal innovation.  Really
http://ccmixter.org is all about this.  There's an incentive to specify
tracks you've remixed as the links between tracks generated when you
specify are a primary means of navigation.  More broadly, linking to
another's blog post when citing it makes it easier to find your post via
services like Technorati, and "blog post" could be any content on the
web.

> Should the CC startt the equivalent of the ISBN number system? The CC 
> number 
> system. Let any producer get a prefix and add a suffix of their choosing to 
> create the CCWN (Creative Commons Work Number) of the work. Then this could 
> be required to be included in the license or the URL (URI?) or somewhere.
> 
> Then, google will tell you where your work is reused in the online world.

There are more complications than I can go into right now, but the short
answer is no.

Ok, here are a few:

- Many CC license users don't go through the CC website/web services.
We aren't in a position to assign identifiers.  Anything that puts us in
that position, delegates the position to someone else, or an algorithm,
e.g, GUID generator, imposes technical and other burdens on licensors
and license integrators.

- What granularity of a work should an identifier identify?

- The existence of an identifier, assuming (massively unrealistic
assumption) that it always travels with the work, only allows a google
to tell you where a work has been copied.  Telling where a work has been
reused means the original work's identifier needs to travel with
derivative works, which will have their own identifiers.

- There are many [wannabe] identifier standards out there.  Some are
well used within a specific format or discipline.  Most are solutions
looking for a problem, or more cynically, entrepreneurs looking for a
monopoly.  In any case, there's little cause for CC to introduce yet
another identifier.

- There's already a well designed, amazingly flexible, decentralized
identifier system widely deployed that CC metadata and pretty much
everything else on the web builds upon -- URIs.  You can use a dc:source
property to identify a source work's URI.


-- 
  Mike Linksvayer
  http://creativecommons.org/about/people#21