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Creative Commons Includes GPL And LGPL Metadata

Posted by timothy on from the self-documenting dept.

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."

4 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Brazilian Portuguese translation of GPL by Via_Patrino · · Score: 4, Informative

    IIRC it was translated for portuguese because the brazilian government is promoting Free Software and contracts in english are not valid in Brazil.

  2. Re:GPL and CC -- Can they co-exist? by LostCluster · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  3. Creative Commons offers a spectrum of licenses by TrentC · · Score: 4, Informative

    Well, their comic "A Spectrum of Rights" explains it better than I can, but in brief, you have several licensing options:

    • Are you required to give attribution to the author?
    • Is commercial distribution allowed, or non-commercial distribution only?
    • Are derivative works allowed, or must the work be distributed as provided?
    • Are derivative works allowed to be relicensed, or must they be distributed under the same terms as the work being derived from?
    • For the GPL and LGPL metadata, they added options for "Make source code available" and "Preserve copyright and licensing notices"; those are not necessarily appropriate for an MP3 file or a text file, and don't seem to be available from the license generator.

    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 (=

  4. Re:limitations of CC by afree87 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.