Subject: copyright

From: Henry Story <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2005 13:41:37 +0100

Hi, I just looked at Lawrence Lessig's presentation to the Library of 
Congress [1],
and noticed his blog that shows Yahoo! search launching a creative 
commons search
engine [2].

Clearly it would be very helpful if there were a machine readable way 
to set copyright
policy on entries. Any thoughts on that?

Henry Story

[1] http://bblfish.net/blog/page5.html#43
[2] http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/002790.shtml

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From: Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2005 08:14:28 -0500

well, we did something similar with p3p, metadata consisting of a a vocab,
either associated with a namespace element, or with an html method.

during the life of the drm wg i discussed the possibility of a similar
mechanism to express some drm metadata.

from my pov, p3p already expresses licensing language -- the recipients
and retention and access (republication, distribution, persistence,
original author rights) elements in particular. "your data is mine, i get
to munge it arbitrarily and flog it on to others under arbitrary terms,
indefintly, and no you can't change anything" -- p3p allows alternate
expressions of "license" (data collection practices).

---

From: "Bob Wyman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2005 11:38:03 -0500

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

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From: [email-masked] (John Panzer)
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2005 09:24:19 -0800

Bob Wyman wrote:

>..
I agree that we should not slide down the DRM slippery slope.  But as 
you note, CC isn't about DRM. 

On a side note, since Atom feeds may already contain a <link 
rel="alternate" ..."> to an HTML page on a server owned by the copyright 
owner, it's already possible to follow the CC recommendations for 
embedding: http://creativecommons.org/technology/embedding

However, if we want to facilitate things like searching and 
categorization, here is an example of an 
obvious-to-the-practitioner-skilled-in-the-art indicator of a CC license 
for Atom:

<link rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/" />

which of course also extends to whatever other license schemes someone 
might come up with, as long as they have URIs.

-John

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From: Henri Sivonen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2005 20:07:31 +0200

> policy on entries. Any thoughts on that?

Legalese is complicated enough that it cannot be fully expressed in 
machine readable form unless the machine is AI-complete. CC has created 
an RDF vocabulary for describing their license elements. However, when 
you start describing eg. the GFDL with CC's vocabulary, you are on 
shaky ground, because the license details may not be exactly equivalent 
to the CC terms.

It seems to me that it is more straight-forward to identify a known 
license than to try to describe a license. Tantek Çelik has publicized 
and mozilla.org (among others) has adopted a 'license' rel value for 
HTML <link>. This approach avoids the issue of machine-readable 
licenses and software interpreting legalese, because a human programmer 
needs to supply the software with known license URIs. Obviously, this 
doesn't work nicely with obscure licenses but assumes that the license 
URIs are well-known. The solution is also less crufty than hiding RDF 
in discardable comments. (Hiding copyright metadata in discardable 
comments is a bad idea, because in some jurisdictions there may soon be 
legislation that makes it illegal to discard copyright metadata. The 
XML spec says software may discard comments.)

However, you cannot make everyone who provides useful feeds to describe 
their policy, so someone running a feed aggregation service still needs 
all lawyer who can convincingly argue against the permission culture.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
[email-masked]
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

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From: "Bob Wyman" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2005 13:09:16 -0500

John Panzer wrote:

> an example of an obvious-to-the-practitioner-skilled-in-the-art indicator
of a CC license for Atom:
> <link rel="license" href= <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/>
"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/" />
> which of course also extends to whatever other license schemes someone
might come up with, as

>  long as they have URIs.
            As John indicates, his encoding method is "obvious". However,
what is apparently *not* obvious to many people is that you can't "enforce"
a Creative Commons license if enforcement involves restricting access to or
use of data. Because this point is a bit subtle, we're likely to have all
sorts of people thinking that providing support for Creative Commons does,
in fact, give them the ability to restrict the use of their data.

            bob wyman

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From: Robert Sayre <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2005 13:25:32 -0500

Henry Story wrote:

> 
> Clearly it would be very helpful if there were a machine readable way to 
> set copyright

This is not an appropriate time to discuss design changes. Please limit 
list traffic to specific editorial suggestions and bug reports.

Robert Sayre

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From: Henri Sivonen <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2005 20:33:30 +0200

> implies that Creative Commons should be used for Digital Rights 

+1

BTW, I think the anti-DRM clause of CC is really intended as an 
anti-anti-circumvention clause and should be rephrased as such. See 
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/03/msg00423.html

-- 
Henri Sivonen
[email-masked]
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

---

From: Henry Story <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2005 21:51:56 +0100

Thanks everyone for all the pointers and thoughts on the subject. I can 
see now that
the issue is not so easy.

I suppose I find the link method described by John quite attractive 
concerning the
CC license.

Henry Story

On 25 Mar 2005, at 18:24, John Panzer wrote:

> rel="alternate" ..."> to an HTML page on a server owned by the 
> copyright owner, it's already possible to follow the CC 
> recommendations for embedding: 
> http://creativecommons.org/technology/embedding
>
> obvious-to-the-practitioner-skilled-in-the-art indicator of a CC 
> license for Atom:
>
>  <link rel="license" 
> href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/" />
>
>  which of course also extends to whatever other license schemes 
> someone might come up with, as long as they have URIs.
>