discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

["Mike Linksvayer" <ml AT creativecommons.org>]

On Mon, 16 Jun 2003 21:33:33 -0500, "Adam Conover" <adam AT tweebiscuit.net>
said:
> 1) We want the videos to be viewable on the web. (This is easy -- we will 
> simply have the CC button on the website.)

You're brilliant.

> 2) We want to encourage people to download the videos and share them 
> through P2P apps, but we still need the licensing information to be 
> included in the file in some form. (From what I gather, you're supposed to 
> include the URL of the license instead of the license itself, so that's 
> what we'll do.)

You're super-brilliant!

> 3) While we think metadata is terrific, our main concern is getting the 
> information in there rather than advancing the goal of metadata 
> standardization.
> 
> Considering that our goal is a quick-and-dirty solution, what is the best 
> way of including the licensing data in the files? These seem to be our
> options:
> 
> 1) .mov metadata. Quicktime doesn't seem to have as standardized a
> metadata 
> format as, say, ID3 tags in MP3s, so where, if anywhere, should this 
> information go in the metadata, and what form should it take? I don't
> have 
> a huge amount of experience with the .mov format, so any advice would be 
> appreciated.

It seems there is an appliation called Metadata Hootenanny
<http://nsorscher.home.attbi.com/apps/MH.html> that serves as a Quicktime
metadata editor.  The best documentation for QT metadata I could find
quickly:
<http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/quicktime/qtdevdocs/QTFF/qtff-50.html>.

Without making a Creative Commons recommendation, you might use Metadata
Hottenanny to populate the copyright field in a fashion similar to that
similarly draft-recommended for the TCOP frame in MP3 ID3 metadata,
something like

2003 Olde English licensed to the public under
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0/ verify at
http://www.oldeenglish.org/license-puppy.rdf

> 2) Another option is to include the URL of the license IN THE VIDEO
> ITSELF, 
> as a video title. This wouldn't work great on the metadata level, but
> would 
> at least preserve the link to the licensing information in a way that
> would 
> be relatively difficult to mess with.

You're right that it wouldn't help as machine-readable metadata, but it'd
be cool to see CC license info in the opening screens and/or credits.
 
> 3) Since, again, our main expected avenue of distribution is P2P 
> filesharing services, what about the various P2P metadata catalogues,
> such 
> as Bitzi tickets?

Bitzi will offer a means to explicitly include licensing information in
tickets, but the only currently available hacks are to associate URLs
and/or comments denoting the license to the ticket.  I encourage you to
do this (NB: I work on Bitzi in my copious spare time).
 
--
  Mike Linksvayer
  http://creativecommons.org/learn/aboutus/people#21