Nikolas 'Atrus' Coukouma wrote:
> I now know that Creative Commons has an RDF schema for describing
> licensing
We've been over this ground many times before. Read my post at:
http://bobwyman.pubsub.com/main/2005/03/lazyweb_query_a.html
Creative commons licenses can only be used to *grant* permissions --
not restrict them. In fact, it is violation of the Creative Commons licenses
to implement systems that interpret CC licenses as prohibiting use. For
example, a CC "non-commercial" license does not forbid commercial use.
Rather, it simply fails to grant commercial use rights. Whether or not
commercial use is permitted depends on other factors -- such as local law,
etc.
To claim that something like a CC "non-commercial" license
prohibited the commercial use of content, you would have to argue that such
use was prohibited whether or not a CC license was present. You would have
to argue that NO content in RSS or Atom feeds could be used without an
explicit grant via Creative Commons or some other means. The result would be
a "poisoning of the stream" in that success of your assertion would
instantly shut down all use of RSS and Atom feeds which did not carry
Creative Commons licenses or other means of granting rights (i.e. 99.9% of
all feeds.)
There is a strong argument that can be made that anyone who
publishes an RSS or Atom file without taking care to control access to the
feed has implicitly waived their right to restrict use of the data since the
usual and customary use of RSS and Atom files is to facilitate aggregation
and syndication.
The Digital Rights Management space is papered with hundreds of
patents -- a number of which claim the use of XML to encode licenses and
many which make general claims concerning methods no matter what encoding
format might be used. Without evidence that someone has done a complete
patent search concerning whatever methods may be proposed to control use of
content (such as noindex extensions, etc.), it is unlikely that any
responsible developer would risk the potential patent infringements that
might result from implementing the method.
> opt-out of services such as Feedster, Technorati, and PubSub.
To the best of my knowledge, there is no useful means by which the
services mentioned can be distinguished from any other form of aggregator.
(Note: I am CTO for PubSub.com. What have you got against us?) The PubSub
service, for instance, only reads RSS and Atom feeds (we do no HTML
scraping) and we produce feeds *only* on behalf of specific users. (with the
exception of a few "sample" feeds.) Thus, you can't distinguish what we do
for our users from what individual users do for themselves with aggregators
running on their own machines. (Of course, users often pay for personal
aggregators while PubSub is free. Which is more commercial?)
> it was suggested by Roger Benningfield that search eninges and
> syndication sites use atom:summary instead of atom:content to
> avoid the noarchive issue.
Most feeds do not contain atom:summary elements. It is optional.
This is not a useful path to a solution. In any case, reliance on
atom:summary elements wouldn't help you with RSS files. If Atom has a rights
issue then RSS does as well.
If you want to have fine control over the use of your feeds, why
don't you use a blogging system that provides such control? For instance,
Yahoo!'s 360 service enables very fine control of access rights. Also,
services like LiveJournal, Typepad, etc. allow you to mark your posts as
"non-public" and as a result they don't get syndicated. The control you want
should be provided by your blogging software -- not embedded in the Atom or
RSS formats. RSS and Atom are formats for open and broad syndication. Any
effort to bring DRM into this world will only result in a poisoning of the
stream and a loss of the value of syndication to the millions who currently
rely on it.
If you really want to focus on non-individual use of your stuff, why
don't you go after the sites that simply take RSS data and use it to build
HTML web sites? It is entirely possible that the implicit waiver concerning
content flowing through the syndication systems does not apply once the
content is removed from the system. (Note: This may be a *very* important
point... but is one for the lawyers, not us mere mortals.)
bob wyman
