[I'm not on cc-metadata, and it is deleting all my mail instead of holding it for moderation, FWIW, which may explain some of my missing context.]
On 8/18/06, Mike Linksvayer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Let me prefix this by saying I hate embedded metadata and would be happy > if nobody ever included a CC license notice in it but there's a there > there so some people feel a need use embedded metadata to note license > status AND there is a longstanding desire from CC to mitigate against > people adding fraudulent license claims to say madonna.mp3 and having > that be people's introduction to CC ... thus this onerous scheme. Hrm. Interesting problem, but the reaction to it smells like premature optimisation to me. Now that wide-scale CC-enabled services like flickr have existed for a couple years, do we have any examples of this happening on any wide scale? I've never seen or heard an example of it, but I've certainly not been paying wide attention to it. My gut feeling is that this would be a rare problem, and the best way to counter it would be to radically lower the barrier to tagging with correct metadata- drown out the bad data (if any) with a stream of good. I might note that if you go with the 'simple' license URL, and the problem of false re-licensing becomes really bad, the worst case scenario is that you deprecate using the straight license URL and require publication. That cost seems much preferable to raising high barriers before the license standard is a success. > See > discussion on this list probably starting in April 2003, though it is > probably missing context from internal CC discussions. <nod> > On Fri, 2006-08-18 at 20:42 -0400, Luis Villa wrote: > > On 8/18/06, Mike Linksvayer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > A web notice gives one the level of assurance that one normally gets > > > from the web ... as opposed to zero. > > > > Ah! yes. We raise it from zero to... practically zero :) Seriously, > > this buys no protection against any serious/meaningful attempts at > > fraud, while making it incredibly onerous for the vast, vast majority > > of the population that can't guarantee a permanent web presence. > > 1. Archive.org, flickr and the like provide permanent web presence for > them. It's still a barrier to entry; worse, phrased that way, it is a barrier to entry *and* lockin to platforms that users don't control. Flickr changes their URL scheme slightly? Oops, all your data suddenly has no valid license. CC could perhaps resolve this problem by offering a web-facing central license registry, much like the PTO does. This could even integrate a basic license validation service- allow the metadata-reader to pass a checksum of the image to the web service, and use that to verify the work. I'd much rather trust CC as a license data repository than any other third party. > 2. A URI that dies is uncool. Yes. > The content musn't have been that > valuable. No. Email addresses that die are uncool; arguably worse than URIs that die (because they are the RI for a *person*, not just data) and yet out in the real world they happen. The never-ending, never-moving URI is a very nice luxury that the digital elite have, but I'd wager it isn't very common for most people. And even if you disagree with that analysis, the goal is to have *lots of people* licensing *lots of content*- not only "valuable" content. If Free Software licenses vanished into the ether, we'd be a lot poorer- stumbling across old code somewhere that no longer has a home, and finding it a new home, is one of the little things that helps free software succeed; CC should learn from that. (Tangentially, isn't one of Lessig's key policy goals that we should make it easier to find out copyright status of old materials, not harder?) > > > > That seems incredibly onerous. > > > > > > It may be, but if I may repeat myself, embedding a reference to a > > > license itself is incredibly worthless. > > > > You're demanding a higher level of accountability with this than with > > any other licensing system I've ever seen. When I publish my code > > under GPL, I don't include a link in the source saying 'this is a link > > to a webpage 'proving' that the code is under GPL', I just do it. > > People publish books under CC all the time which just say 'the license > > is foo', even though PDFs, HTML, and text are all editable- just like > > the exif fields. I'm really not clear why EXIFs, as opposed to any > > other editable content format ever, deserve this special publisher > > burden. > > Printed books and code have provide lots of other context by which one > can judge provenance Surely madonna fans can tell the provenance of a madonna song, if that is the concern? I do see the point, in the other response, that images and music are different from text/code, in that there is no way to express the license 'up front'. If anything, though, it feels to me that this is a good reason to make machine-readable metadata > and there's no (or precious little) attempt to make > printed copyright notices or license headers/COPYRIGHT.txt accompanying > code machine readable. Which is a mistake, but tangential to this discussion :) > However, an alternative is to make embedded metadata less machine > readable. Nonono! Machine-readable licenses lower the barrier to remix and reuse- which should be a critical goal for CC. Luis _______________________________________________ cc-devel mailing list [email protected] http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-devel
