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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".
Freshmeat
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.
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
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 (=
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.
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.
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
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
The first is obviously that ShareAlike and GPL are incompatible. That's annoying and it would be nice if they would merge.
:
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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.
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