Henry Story wrote:
> Yahoo! search launching a creative commons search engine ... it would be
> very helpful if there were a machine readable way to set copyright
> policy on entries.
I recently wrote on my blog about issues with Creative Commons. I
suggest you read the post. See:
http://bobwyman.pubsub.com/main/2005/03/lazyweb_query_a.html
The basic message is that we should not be writing anything that
implies that Creative Commons should be used for Digital Rights Management.
To do so would be a violation of both the letter and spirit of the Creative
Commons Licenses.
Creative Commons is about granting rights, not restricting them. The
goal of creative commons is to take content whose use would be normally
restricted by existing copyright law and to "liberate" it by permitting the
owner to explicitly grant particular uses. Although this is commonly
misunderstood, there is no language in Creative Common licenses that allows
you to say that some particular use is *not* permitted. Creative Commons
only lets you say what uses are permitted.
The misunderstanding typically comes around the "non-commercial use"
stuff in Creative Commons. People often read this as a statement that
commercial use is prohibited. However, this reading is wrong. What a
"non-commercial" Creative Commons license does is grant non-commercial
rights while being silent on commercial use. Such a license says, in effect:
"You can ignore whatever laws, etc. would normally restrict non-commercial
use. However, any restrictions established by law, etc. that apply to
commercial use are left unmodified." A "non-commercial" Creative Commons
license does not prohibit commercial use -- it simply fails to address the
issue.
Thus, if you were to build a system that prohibited commercial use
of content with a Creative Commons non-commercial use license, you would be
saying that you thought that existing law, etc. prohibited commercial use in
the absence of an explicit grant of such rights via Creative Commons or some
other mechanism. What this means is that you would have to implement a
policy that prohibited all commercial use unless there was a Creative
Commons commercial use grant. Basically, you would have to shut down all
commercial use of RSS/Atom, by default and only permit it if it was
explicitly addressed in licenses. Given that this would immediately "turn
off" just about the entire Blogosphere, it probably isn't what you want to
do.
If you want a mechanism to permit a rights owner to affirm that
something like commercial use is prohibited, you would have to create a new
format -- something other than Creative Commons. Unfortunately, to do that,
you would have to first find some tiny hole in the carpet of hundreds of
patents that surround the software licensing and Digital Rights Management
space. Personally, I think it is very unlikely that you would be successful.
We're going to have to wait 10 or so years before those patents start
expiring.
So, in summary, let's not go down the DRM path. It is a snake pit
from which no good will come. Also, please see my post about Creative
Commons at:
http://bobwyman.pubsub.com/main/2005/03/lazyweb_query_a.html
bob wyman
