Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

jonathon wrote:
> Other than plain text, in which it can be included at either the top,
> or bottom of the file, what file formats do not have the ability to
> embed metadata?

The real problem is not so much that file formats do not *in principle*
support metadata, but rather than few authoring tools provide the means
to edit the metadata.

For example, GIF, PNG, JPG, OGG, FLAC, and MP3 all provide metadata
header support in their official standards, but you'll have a hard time
finding software that makes it easy to put your licensing and
attribution data in there.

Even with MP3's "ID3" standard, there is some bizarreness. For example,
there is no license field, just a "Copyright?" (Y/N) field. This betrays
 and propagates misunderstandings about free licensing -- the idea that
free licensed works are not copyrighted (or that copyright status is the
only thing that matters, rather than licensing).

Even if you do have a means of marking the files, the tagging standards
are not made very easy.

Artists are meant to do art, not be technical specialists. If it's too
hard, they're not going to be able to do it. Tagging by reference in a
web page is the de facto standard for many kinds of artistic content.

This is still a pretty big problem. I've been working on a Python
library to make this a little easier (so it could be embedded in other
programs, web applications, etc), but it's far from finished:

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

Cheers,
Terry

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