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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."
What you call "viral" is what CC calls "share alike". It's what I call "copyleft".
Freshmeat
Also SourceForge.
IIRC it was translated for portuguese because the brazilian government is promoting Free Software and contracts in english are not valid in Brazil.
The main Creative Commons licenses are based on the three questions on this page.
Basically, a CC license could require attribution or not, allow commerical use or not, and allow modification or not allow modification or allow modification only if licensed under the same CC license. It's very flexible, and easy to express in 3 icons which options have been selected.
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 (=
This problem has already been solved by the CC people, who thought of it when the issue of adding metadata to music came up.
So there's no problem, with MP3s at least.
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.
Well, you may very well argue with the logic but note that none of these actions have anything to do with the GPL - it's a politically motivated decision by the project leaders that seems to be based largely on a dislike for the APSL and apples DMCA-based shutdown of iDVD extensions.
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.
fortunately, you're wrong. we even have music label releasing solely music released under cc license. check http://www.egoboobits.net and enjoy the freedom.
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
Gnomoradio can already download music automatically under a CC license. But you're right--right now there is only a limited amount of music on the system, and it is further limited to artists who have explicitly signed up for the system. But it seems promising. See gnomoradio.org
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
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/"
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