Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

geni wrote:
> On 04/01/2008, Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com> wrote:
>>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.
> 
> Original gif format didn't. 

Doesn't matter because 89a is a complete superset, so any 87a GIF can be
convert to 89a with comments (which is what I do with them).

> JPG metadata is quite well supported.

I wouldn't call it "well supported". You have an ability to embed text,
but there's no structure. XMP would provide that, but there's not much
support for that in applications.

EXIF doesn't really count, because it has fixed fields and if there are
any associated with attribution and licensing, they certainly aren't
well supported (or even well documented).

(You do get technical metadata from the camera).

> Ogg
> container does not have any standard for metadata. The codecs do in
> theory.

Ogg Vorbis and Theora have standards for key-value pairs holding
metadata. There is not a broad standard for what keys should be used
(though I think CC does have some recommendations) for attribution and
licensing. Again, though, this is not yet "easy".

In order for this to become common practice, there are 4 things that
need to change:

1) Domain specific authoring software needs to make it easier to embed
metadata (and possibly more obvious that you should)

2) Domain specific viewing software and web applications need to display
the metadata that is there, so that users will see what they are
accomplishing by embedding the data. (As a proof-of-principle, consider
that, since AMP players display title and author track information while
playing a track, most authors are pretty careful to fill in those fields)

3) General purpose tools for embedding and displaying metadata in any
sort of format (and interconverting between them) need to be available.

For example, you should, by default, NOT lose your attribution and
licensing data when simply converting from GIF to PNG to JPG.

4) The importance of using meta data needs to be actively marketed to
content producers.

It's one thing to have a standard "right" way to do things, but it's a
bit more of a chore to set things up so that people will actually use it.

Cheers,
Terry

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