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Subject: discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

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  • From: Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org>
  • To: discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work <cc-metadata AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: CC in DNS TXT records
  • Date: Fri, 14 Jan 2005 14:16:24 -0800

Snowchyld wrote about this idea (quoted below) and has joined cc-metadata, thus I'm replying here.

Creative idea. The main problems with the general idea I see are

- there's no established practice of using dns to publish metadata about stuff published on the web
- no web software looks at dns txt records
- it's hard for normal users to look at dns txt records themselves
- it's hard for normal publishers to add txt records for their domains

In some cases above it wouldn't be hard if they knew how, but that's not a valid point.

Furthermore, it isn't clear how useful domain-level licensing would be, or exactly what it would mean. What about content published from a domain via email, https, IM, etc? What about people who want to license every resource, or to use different licenses for different resources? What does having a simple license reference in dns mean?

A similar option would be to publish license.txt (think robots.txt). That wouldn't suffer some of the problems above, but for various reasons that model hasn't taken off as a means to publish web metadata.

"instead of tagging each .c,.h,.pl,.mp3,.php file" is somewhat of a canard.

Nobody suggests doing that. On web pages put license metadata in a template, or have your html-generating-program spit it out dynamically. For programs follow established practice and put a LICENSE, COPYRIGHT or whatever file in the distribution. We have a spec out for tagging individual mp3 files because those are often distributed off the web -- but note that our recommendation to to embed a URL from which to obtain metadata from -- on the web.

SPF and competitors work for a very specifc domain (sorry to overload that word) that doesn't require web integration.

The specific syntax proposed below is needlessly compressed, and doesn't even map to a single license (due to jurisdiction ports). I'd say publish the full license URI -- in any machine-readable context.

All that said, I'm sure there are many other potential fruitful uses of DNS TXT records, maybe even involving licensing. I can be real ignorant.

Mike

snowchyld wrote:
Hi Mike, the idea was based on the concept of: i have projects on
domains, and sub projects of projects, i want an idea / concept / what
not to be released under CC, instead of tagging each
.c,.h,.pl,.mp3,.php file with a CC license, bungle it into a TXT NS
record and publish

taken from the idea of the spf and domain-key records (anti spam NS entries)
$ nslookup -q=TXT snowchyld.org | grep -i text
snowchyld.org text = "v=spf1 mx -all"
snowchyld.org text = "v=cc2 +by +nc"

v=spf1 is SPF / Sender Policy Framework / http://spf.pobox.com/

v=cc2 is my creative commons idea (http://snowchyld.org/cc/)

the basic idea is domains, or sub domains, and any projects in it
could have a license (and way of parsing the license) into the DNS
entry of the domain..

probably doesn't make much sense or be of any use, but the idea is there ^_^;

things like free.mp3.davidbowie.com could have a CC license of sharealike
and sample.mp3.davidbowie.com would have a sampling license..

(david bowie is just an example =P)

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



  • CC in DNS TXT records, Mike Linksvayer, 01/14/2005

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