Re: atom license extension (Re: [cc-tab] *important* heads up)
Karl Dubost wrote: IMHO, when the implementors do not understand the licenses, they have no rights to do things with content (because it's highly dependant of local laws) Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Implementors have the rights they have under the applicable set of laws, irrespective of whether or not they understand those rights. -- Elliotte Rusty Harold [EMAIL PROTECTED] Java I/O 2nd Edition Just Published! http://www.cafeaulait.org/books/javaio2/ http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0596527500/ref=nosim/cafeaulaitA/
Re: atom license extension (Re: [cc-tab] *important* heads up)
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Le 7 sept. 06 à 01:29, John Panzer a écrit : This is a critical point. Without this, implementors cannot safely ignore licenses they don't understand (falling back to things like fair use if they can't find any licenses that grant additional copying rights). This means that implementors would likely have to drop feeds containing new licenses on the floor, meaning that new license schemes would never be deployed. People with legal background will confirm or not, but fair use doesn't exist in the same way in all countries. Offering a mechanism to provide licensing information is good. Encouraging a *legal* fallback mechanism is bad, very bad. IMHO, when the implementors do not understand the licenses, they have no rights to do things with content (because it's highly dependant of local laws) That's why I said 'things like' fair use. Our legal department has been having fun with this topic over the past several months. I do agree with you that encouraging people to provide licenses is good. I think that there are fallback mechanisms whether or not we encourage them. I think that a fallback mechanism -- implied rights to copy for limited purposes -- is a good thing, and whatever gets specified should not work against it. It's an unfortunate fact that the available mechanisms are 'squishy' and vary with local laws, but they are better than nothing, which seems to be what you advocate. More practically, if every feed reader and processor has to be modified to understand a license before the license can be used in published feeds, the ability to deploy and experiment with licenses will be drastically reduced. Which drastically reduces the utility of having licenses. (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
RE: atom license extension (Re: [cc-tab] *important* heads up)
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
Re: atom license extension (Re: [cc-tab] *important* heads up)
Wendy Seltzer wrote: ... The concern about limiting implied licenses is important, though. By definition, an implied license is one that's presumed from the context of an offering and by the absence of a contrary explicit license. If as a factual matter, many people have been acting based on implied licenses of broader scope than either fair use or what would be chosen in an explicitly linked license, then you might say it's better not to provide this encouragement to link licenses at all (and hoping that time and general practice will morph those implied terms into fair uses). If the rfc encourages people to add licenses, it opens up the possibility that their explicit terms will contradict and override what has previously been implied. That's a worrying Heisenburg effect. This is a critical point. Without this, implementors cannot safely ignore licenses they don't understand (falling back to things like fair use if they can't find any licenses that grant additional copying rights). This means that implementors would likely have to drop feeds containing new licenses on the floor, meaning that new license schemes would never be deployed. ... Thus, it would seem that the only effective use of the license link is to grant rights not to restrict them. Yes. Given the current murky and complicated legal situation with implied licenses, fair use, etc., granting explicit and well defined rights is a huge win for everyone. I don't think there's a legal mechanism for telling people you may only use this format if you grant a license equally or more permissive than X. (at least none short of patent claims on the format itself...) No, but I think there may be a technical mechanism for saying this particular extension only lets you grant rights with each new license link, not take them away: ... How about (IANAL of course): Nor can a license restrict or remove any implied copy or usage rights which would otherwise exist in the absence of the license. The intent being that adding a license, or a new type of license, is always safe: If what you're doing with content is allowable, if the feed provider adds a license, it is still allowable. There is a parallel with the principle of substitutability [1] in software engineering, which allows extension while maintaining desirable invariants (in this case, the ability to what one would naturally expect to do with a feed). [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liskov_substitution_principle -John Panzer http://abstractioneer.org
