Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

Lucas Gonze wrote:
> I am really frustrated by the labor involved in CC licensing for my
> own music.  It's not clear what I am supposed to do, and the tools are
> just a bummer to make work.  EG cli-tools doesn't do Ogg.

I realize this isn't quick enough to help you now, but I am working on
a tool to make this job easier in the future:

http://light-princess.org/palimpsest/

It's written as a Python library, but a command line utility will be a
application, which I'll probably provide with it as soon as the
high-level interfaces are written. The idea is to have one tool with a
common user interface that can insert metadata into a variety of
multimedia formats (via plugins).

I wish I could say it was usable now, but right now it just does GIF
files and has a very low-level interface, so it's not quite ready for
prime time.

However... plugins are easy to write for anyone with a knowledge of
Python and the format in question, and I've already written a guide for
writing them (that was a HINT there, in case anybody missed that! ;-) ).

As for the higher-level interfaces, that's really no more than
'plumbing', and I plan to get started on that within this month. Of
course, I wouldn't say 'no' if someone offered to help with that, too:
I've already documented the spec. :-)

> But is it possible that things have changed to the extent that I can
> live without any embedded metadata at all, per
> http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Nonweb_Tagging?

This has always been possible -- in fact, it's kind of a de facto
standard, unfortunately (for the reasons I outline in the intro to
Palimpsest). The point of embedding metadata is to keep the information
from getting separated from the file without having to rely on your
audience practicing meticulous recordkeeping.

Cheers,
Terry

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock AT AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com