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Creative Commons Includes GPL And LGPL Metadata
TrentC writes "I was looking at the Creative Commons site this weekend, and was surprised to find, on their license generation page, entries (translated into Portuguese) in a sidebar for the GNU General Public License and GNU Lesser General Public License, including RDF blocks.
Since CC is pushing for projects that can generate, validate, display and search for CC license metadata, how cool would it be to be able to do a Google search for GPL-licensed material, or a P2P network for MP3s released under the CC Attribution-ShareAlike license? As an example, Nathan Yergler has released mozCC, a plugin for Mozilla and Firebird that allows you to view CC license information embedded in a webpage, and provides icons on the status bar displaying the CC license options."
Select the "must be licenced under CC" box, and then search for music and other stuff you can download guilt-free.
Not sure there would be many results to your search though, but it might catch on.
Homme petit d'homme petit, s'attend, n'avale
Seems like the Moz plugin is what would be really powerful. Then the license data could be slammed into a sidebar for anyone who really needs it, and the icon would profide enough information for Joe FreeData.
I can't even begin to think about what a feed showing all (L)GPL and FDL stuff would look like. Fatter than the Freshmeat feed, I would suppose.
The previous sig has been removed due to
What you call "viral" is what CC calls "share alike". It's what I call "copyleft".
Yes, does anyone know of a search engine where you can search for GPL based software?
For some odd reason GPL software is always of 'better quality'.
That GNU-Darwin people decides not to link to proprietary libraries is, of course, a result of them using the GNU Public License so extensively and now because of that decision the primary Darwin development platform is no longer supported in this project!
This makes me shake my head and wonder what the fuck? This project is not only shooting itself in the foot by choosing a platform not fully supported by the OS, but is also screwing over the real meat of Darwin's userbase: PowerPC owners. This move is akin to opening a car garage (in America) whose mechanics are all experienced in servicing American cars, and then changing policy months later, stating that the garage will only work on foreign models.
Where is the fucking logic?
Seriously, am I the only one who is wondering who the Hell is in charge at that project? Kool-Aid Man? This move makes so little sense I can't tell if the people at GNU-Darwin are really that stupid, or if I am waking up in alternate realities every damn morning. I almost kind of hope for the latter.
This is the GPL in action, Mac faithful. Get down on your knees and kiss Apple's butt for choosing the BSD license.
I would love a search engine on which I could search for Open Source Software and CC media, all with one click. However, and perhaps someone more informed than I can explain this, I was under the impression that the GPL was distinct from the CC because, under CC work, any user can use it for any reason and reproduce it without notice, and can then sell it. However, under the GPL, all contributions made under the GPL must be re-released and made available to the public with the GPL notice. In CC, you don't have to worry about license issues.
Anyone able to compare and contrast the two?
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"We are Linux. Resistance is measured in Ohms."
CC does not let you know *who* is asserting that a work falls under a particular license. How do you know if that Britney Spears mp3 is really in the public domain as the embedded CC metadata asserts?
Probably there needs to be some sort of online rights clearing house along with some sort of PKI infrastructure.
IIRC it was translated for portuguese because the brazilian government is promoting Free Software and contracts in english are not valid in Brazil.
If Darl will have the GPL declared unconstitutional by the end of 2004?
Mod "Overrated" instead of replying "I disagree with you," you coward.
Our biggest problem is that we, as a society, have confused well marketed with "good." There's thousands of great musicians running around that are not well known. What main stream America wants is the marketed music. Well, guess what? marketing machines are about making money. Imagine who cool it would be if all the effort thrown into pirating the marketed stuff went into creating an underground force for marketing independent music? The cool thing about the creative commons license is that it is a start in making such an underground force.
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World66, the largest open content travel site
... and SCO calls "ours".
Well, their comic "A Spectrum of Rights" explains it better than I can, but in brief, you have several licensing options:
Those first four options can be combined to form eleven different licensing combinations, and the CC website will generate the necessary metadata and provide you with links to the "human-readable" (heh) and legal license documentation. The GPL would probably be considered similar to the Attribution-ShareAlike license.
The important thing to remember is Creative Commons is not a license, it's a spectrum of licenses that can be tailored to your needs. And remember, you can always contact the author and work out a better deal if their license doesn't work for you.
Jay (=
Offtopic, and GPL bashing Anonymously. A textbook troll.
Not entirely sure why you were modded up. Apple didn't choose the BSD license, they took code that was licensed under the BSD license and relicensed it under the APSL.
Just because it's commercial doesn't mean it isn't GPL'd. In fact, all free software licenses allow you to distribute works licensed under them for a fee. Perhaps you meant proprietary works being mislabeled as though they were GPL'd, thus attempting to deceive people into believing that the work is licensed under the GPL when it actually isn't. I imagine this could be solved with a competitive set of organizations who compete on accuracy as well as speed and number of returned hits.
Digital Citizen
CC RDF metadata can include fields for name of author, name of copyright holder, and the name of the work. The Creative Commons page on embedding license information in non-web files covers how validating the license would work.
You embed a link to a web page into the license data; the web page confirms the embedded license data. If the license link is not there, or the license data at the webpage and the embedded license data don't match, then it does not validate; a good agent would notify you of this, and perhaps even not let you download the non-validating files.
Yes, you could put up a fraudulent site with fraudulent license data. But that's like saying "selling used cars isn't practical, because I could steal a car and forge the registration." There's a reason fraud is a crime...
A community that wants to encourage distribution of legitimate works would not let a fraudulent site stay up for long once discovered, which would break the validation chain. And that is the community this system is designed to serve.
Jay (=
But when I submitted it to Kuro5hin, the preview showed the RDF meta data literally (visibly) in the text, I think to indicate that Scoop was rejecting it. That is, Kuro5hin didn't accept HTML comments in the markup.
Also, Creative Commons advises posting the Some Rights Reserved image as the license notice, but I couldn't do that because kuro5hin (very sensibly) doesn't allow images. That's why I posted the license notice at the end of the article the way CC says to do for a text file.
Now, I'm sure Scoop could be updated to allow RDF, but how many online communities are there, and how many will need their software updated?
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Quite interesting, actually. He does put forward a good point implied by the rather bizarre usage of the word 'free' that the FSF/GNU have adopted. A BSD license just isn't free enough any more?
Then of course there are sites like MacBand, which allows people to download songs created in Apple's GarageBand program for use under various Creative Commons licenses. Metadata available in search engines, however, would be much more prolific; it doesn't require anyone to actually do anything other than put the license on their page (or metadata). Sort of reminds me of Blogchalking.
I've been saying for a long time scientific work (Physics videos, math tutor programs, etc) should be released unto p2p.
Discovery or whomever (PBS, it is our content America!) should donate third run shows that can be downloaded and viewed at home or school.
Doesn't need to be explained more than that. Give the shows a month to be aired on TV and then the History Channel hands them over to the net. If they release it free as in beer we will respect their trademarks.
Like I said, I've suggested it before and have written a paper on it and posted it here before (under this Login I believe).
Get your Unix fortune now!
Look at the different outputs in page 2 of the license generator:
:P
- Human readable
- Lawyer readable
- Machine readable
Good to know lawyers aren't humans, i was starting to worry
I'm a chainsmokin' alcoholic sociopath, so-ci-o-path
Likely they would have the same trouble with it kuro5hin did, and whoever was trying to make the copy would be sorely confused.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
I seem to recall in the past that Creative Commons had some problems with the GPL and its ilk in the past due to its somewhat viral nature.
Hmmm...
I seemto recall that the only propblem the Creative Commons people had with the GPL was that it was to specific to acheive what they were attempting to acheive. Which is why the Creative Commons does not promote only a single license, but a full spectrum of licenses that are only as limiting or as "viral" as the copyright holder whishes them to be. There is a Creative Commons "Share Alike" license that is very much similar to the GPL.
Read, L
Not quite so automated (yet), but their are quite a few very good bits of music and images. Check out opart.org and opsound.org for a rather eclectic selection. Check out Loca Records for some highly polished electronica music. subatomicglue is a great electronic band using copyleft. Finally, I have a 4 GB copyleft music archive at dxdt.org/audio/. Also see some ideas for how a p2p system could work at www.dxdt.org/exchange.html
As more and more of theses sites get tagged well w.r.t. license and contributor information, we should see some great search engines, with features like: show derivative works, show sources, etc.
Luke Stodola
An important step forward, yes. The "start," no. (There can only be one "start" -- anything after the first is not a start but a continuation. Thus, "a start" can only logically be read as "the start.")
Even the EFF's Open Audio License (for which they've apparently dropped support, in order to support the Creative Commons effort), which was the basis for the Open Music Registry, which itself predated Creative Commons, was not the "start" of building an "underground" force for marketing independent music.
I suppose this will be considered "nit-picking" because the main point of your post was to underscore the value of the CC licensing system, but I think it's worthwhile to point out that just because something is worthwhile doesn't mean it's not built on the works of others, either directly or conceptually.
No Laughing Allowed!
This move makes so little sense I can't tell if the people at GNU-Darwin are really that stupid, or if I am waking up in alternate (sic) realities every damn morning. I almost kind of hope for the latter.
Your wish has been granted -- every morning you are waking up in an alternative reality, resulting to a large extent (but certainly not entirely) from your decisions made on the prior day. Had you made different choices yesterday, your reality today would be different than what it is.
Perhaps if you used a more sensible approach to affecting the development of GNU-Darwin, rather than ranting on Slashdot, the reality you woke up to today would be more to your liking. But don't despair, because the reality you wake up to tomorrow is being affected by your decisions right now.
The analogue to "source code" of a musical work would be the unmixed, unmastered tracks, along with the project settings which resulted in the final mix. Someone could take out an instrument (if they wanted to play that part, for example) or otherwise remix our mess around with it, which they can't do as easily when its just a premixed stereo Vorbis file.
...but it is not "official". The only official version is the English one. Basicly, you can direct them to their localized variant, and inform them the English licence is supposed to be exactly identical to that one.
The reason it isn't used in other languages is due to the legal minefield of trying to ensure that two licences are in fact exactly the same under the letter of the law, each definition of the words meaning the same, no sentence can be interpreted differently.
It could be done, but the resulting legal document would probably be more challenging to read than learning English and reading the original licence. So I would simply keep it as it is today - you may read a very good, and presumably very accurate translation - but the offical licence is in English.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Most software is shit.
:
Shitty commercial is released, doesnt sell, the company goes bankrupt and is gone.
Shitty GPL'd software will be on Freshmeat/SourceForge forever.
However, when commercial software is good and becomes popular, it sells well, the company makes money, starts a new project, every good developper wants to work on the new "cool" project and the once good software slowly bitrots in the hands of the maintenance crew to mediocrity.
When GPL'd software is good and becomes popular, it attracts user and developpers, so even more good developpers work on it and it becomes excellent.
Conclusions
- Bad commercial software disappears, Good degrades.
- Bad GPL'd software stays (and haunts SF), Good excels
- Commercial software tends to be mediocre
- GPL'd software tends to be extrem (either crap or excellent)
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof for my post which this sig is too small to contain.
The first is obviously that ShareAlike and GPL are incompatible. That's annoying and it would be nice if they would merge.
:
:
The second, not so obvious, difference is in a little, but dangerous legal detail
From CC-ShareAlike
8.c If any provision of this License is invalid or unenforceable under applicable law, it shall not affect the validity or enforceability of the remainder of the terms of this License,
IANAL, but I guess that, if someone challenge succesfully the requirement that you have to license derivated work alike, (as SCO is trying to) the other terms remain intakt, INCLUDING the right to make derivates.
Therefor, such a challenge would actually transform the licence to the "Share" (or BSD) type.
The GPL, however, explicitly forbits this.
So when succesfully challenged,
CC ShareAlike transforms into Share,
GPL transforms into standard copyright (= no rights)
And I prefere GPL because of this protection, that gives the time to evaluate new licenses.
There's a reason why I havent choosen BSD from the beginning.
I have discovered a truly remarkable proof for my post which this sig is too small to contain.
Great idea ... and surprising how many pages have CC info.
A nice feature for the next version would be mozilla-editor tool that easily generates the license meta-data.
especially manuals for commercial products. Manuals are full of information and are in some ways "ads" for a company's products. Chiral Software's manual for its WAP server software is licensed under the Creative Commons system.
You have not proved any of your 'conclusions', you've just spouted off the usual FSF propaganda. Why not take a step back and look at how things really work? You'll find reality to be quite different to how you describe.
There are already good projects working on this license! Just take a look at iRATE. (They even do mention our efforts at their blog).
"5 February 2004 Perth, Western Australia
New Zealander Anthony Jones announced the third minor release of the iRATE radio client today. iRATE radio provides users with a powerful new way to find and download free, legal music online. Users rate tracks based on their tastes. The iRATE server then selects other tracks to send to the user from a database of over 50,000 freely downloadable songs by correlating the user's ratings with other users and finding people with similar tastes.
Unlike streaming audio, iRATE saves the tracks to the user's hard drive. This means that playback is smoother, without the typical problems associated with streaming media, such as high bandwidth usage.
iRATE radio is written in Java, and is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
Windows users can easily get up and running with iRATE radio using Sun's Java Web Start and Internet Explorer. For other browsers on Windows and Linux, users may need to download and install Java WebStart separately. There are also native Debian, Mandrake, and Redhat Linux packages available. Mac users will be pleased to hear that a disk image (.DMG) file for OS X will be released within a week.
This release features a new, more intuitive user interface, a refined track selection algorithm, and better download performance. Other improvements include a new icon (following the recent icon contest), tool tips, ID3 tag display, artist's website link support, playlist management, and many others.
Since the project's registration at SourceForge in March 2003, iRATE radio has gathered an increasing number of developers. The user base now numbers over 8,000 individuals. However, there is still a lot of work to be done. Jones recently made an announcement to the development mailing list detailing thirteen focus areas for improvement. These included translations, native playback (for improved decoding performance), better server-side track selection, multimedia key binding support, audio prompting, more publicity, and several others.
The iRATE radio website is at http://irate.sourceforge.net/"
My journal. Mainly about freedom.