John Panzer asks of Karl Dubost:
> (Let's say that Doc Searls somehow discovers a license that
> would deny sploggers more than implied rights to his content
> while allowing liberal use for others[1], and deploys it.
> Are you saying that all of his readers' feed software would
> have to drop his feed content until they're upgraded to
> understand the license?) [1] http://doc.weblogs.com/2006/08/28
I think John's question can be (aggressively) rephrased as: "Can Doc
Searls, by inserting a license in his feed, 'poison' the entire syndication
system that we've built over the last few years?" (i.e. Can he do things
that make it unsafe or illegal for people to do things which the syndication
system was intentionally built to permit and which he knew were being done
before he willingly inserted his content into the syndication network?) I
don't think so.
As argued in other messages, I strongly believe that we should not
do anything that hinders or conflicts with the establishment or recognition
of a limited implied license to syndicate content which is formatted using
RSS/Atom and is made openly available on the network. (An interesting
question, of course, would be: "What does it mean to 'syndicate'?")
In any case, there is a general problem of "proper notice" here. As
mentioned before, there is nothing special about an optional IETF protocol
extension. This subject of inserting licenses in content should be discussed
in a general sense -- not limited to this specific protocol extension.
A vital question to ask is: What is proper notice of the presence of
a license? No IETF standard has the force of law. Readers are not obligated
to understand or even take note of the license links. Thus, no one using it
should be able to have any expectation that readers will take note of it any
more than they would of many other possible means of inserting licenses or
references to them in content. Publishers and consumers should both be
working on the assumption that normal copyright exists (i.e *all rights
reserved*) except where there are fair use privileges of implied licenses
that weaken the *all rights* default.)
If we were to allow or encourage any one mechanism to associate
restrictive licenses with content, we establish a precedent that would allow
or encourage others as well. Any other "standards group" or informal
collection of one or more persons could decide to define a new mechanism --
just like the IETF did. At that point, no reader could safely consume
content since no matter how many mechanisms they supported there might be
some others that they didn't know about. The issue here is about proper
notice... How can we obligate folk to respect licenses that they have no
means of discovering?
We should also ask: "At what point does a restrictive license become
operative?" Imagine that I decided that reading (copying) of my feeds by
commercial organizations was to be prohibited. Could I bar such copying by
putting a license in the content itself? Of course, if I did, that means
that in order to discover that copying was not permitted the reader would
have to actually do the thing which is prohibited. Clearly, even if there
was some way to put effective restrictive licenses in content, there would
have to remain some "implied license" exceptions to the *all rights"
provision of copyright.
We are all best served by an assumption that copyright leaves "all
rights" reserved to the publisher and that only "fair use," "limited implied
license to syndicate," and "explicit license grants (like CC)" limit the
totality of those rights. With this in mind it might be best to change from
a "license" link to a "rights-grant" link... In other words, frame this link
type as something which can *only* be used to broaden rights, not restrict
them.
bob wyman
