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."

Comments

Re:Would be great for P2P

[Anonymous Coward]

Until people start tagging commercial copyrighted stuff as GPL. Perhaps in the future, trusted computing will make these categorizations possible (and reliable).

limitations of CC

[akb]

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.

Re:limitations of CC

[LostCluster]

Well, for that matter, neither does the GPL. Something posted with a GPL license next to it may not have come from the legit copyright owner, therefore the GPL doesn't stick either.

Re:GPL and CC -- Can they co-exist?

[kirkjobsluder]

Perhaps the most important difference is that the GPL is designed around one specific type of creative work while the CC licenses are intended to be generic over multiple classes of creative works. For example, the thought of applying the GPL to dramatic productions and mixed-media artwork where the concept of "source code" is problematic makes my head spin. How do you distribute the source code of an improv jaz session?

The CC does include a copyleft license known as "Share and share alike".

Re:GPL Search Engine?

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't a troll, it's true. Most GPL'd projects are shit. It's the rare few that really stand out. This is contrary to commercial software, where the software has to be at least half-decent to sell any, and thus be released as such.

Problems with the ShareAlike license

[TekGoNos]

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.