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Proving Creative Commons Licensing of a Work?
Q7U asks: "I recently posted a few Creative Commons licensed photographs from Flickr on one of my websites. I later noticed that one of the photographers had retroactively switched all of his photos from the Creative Commons license to an 'All Right Reserved' notice. When I saw this I went ahead and removed his photo (even though I understand that CC licenses are perpetual unless violated), but this begs the question: How does one prove one obtained a work under a Creative Commons license, should there ever be a dispute between a creator and the licensee? Is a simple screenshot of the webpage where it was offered proof enough? Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated."
In the past, I've tried to obtain the best physical proof possible, be it a timestamped email that affirms the license, or a piece of paper with a signature on it. Really, the best method is to get a positive affirmation on the work being CC, before the license is pulled.
~ C.
Too bad it's from Flickr. The indexing done by the Wayback Machine (archive.org) makes it easy to see how most individual websites looked at various points in the past.
For me, as a writer, director, producer, and someone who sometimes does some amateur photography and other types of image creation, I think there's a bigger issue.
I, personally, don't want to be using someone's work as part of mine if they don't want it involved. When Kubrick used music from György Ligeti, his favorite composer, he was later sued for misuse of the composer's work. (I hear the composer won, but I don't remember the details.)
If someone has made photos licensed under CC, if I were going to use them, I'd be sure to obtain permission and verification first. I know there are some people who don't care about such things, but I feel it can detract from my work or my later editing of that work if there are issues involving arguments or fights over whether or not I had the right to use something in what I was doing.
In other words, do you really want to put in all the effort to use something against the will of the creator/author instead of finding something else that will do?
If you decide you want to buy a piece of land, or think that a piece of land is public property and would like to perform some activity on it, what do you do? You got to the local town office and find out who owns the land, what restrictions there on that land, and who you must contact to ask permission to use or buy the land. This is a good system that has been in place in the US since its foundation.
The copyright system is like private property's evil twin. It is still a form of "property", but the "system" designed to deal with questions of use and ownership is utterly non-existent. For instance, this post I am writing is protected by copyright. True, there is no indication in this post that shows it is under copyright, and the fact that I have my e-mail address hidden means that you can't ask permission to use it. This post will NOT be recorded in any government database so you can never look up who owns it and what the rules of using it are. Our current copyright system is a default "everything is copyrighted" and there is absolutely NO record of who owns what. You can't even find out when a copyright expires because there is no record of when it was first created.
We desperately need a new copyright system.
The new system should REQUIRE the registration of copyrighted content. There MUST be a public record of who owns what and for how long they have had it under copyright. Further, there is not a damn reason in the world why we need copyrights that span centuries as the current system does. Anything that is not registered as copyrighted should be considered public domain. Slap in a fee of a couple bucks to register copyrighted content, throw up an Internet site to register such copyrights, and we would have a workable system.
The current system as about as far away from good as you can possibly get. To answer the articles original question, there is absolutely nothing you can do. There are no records of what is under copyright and no way of finding out if that copyright changes. The current system sucks balls and no politician gives a shit because voters don't realize such issues exist, much less care about such issues.
Sucks to be someone who uses creative content. Sorry.
if you go to court, you can subpoena flickr and they will prove that the license was different at the time you downloaded it.
If you're doing something IMPORTANT with it (like publishing a book or article) I'd get a piece of paper from the photog.
In the case of music licensing, you go to BMI or ASCAP. If you want to republish a book, you go to the publisher or the author and get a contract in writing. The writer's guild provides a standard contract for producers who want to hire a writer (work for hire) or buy their product (outright transfer of license).
Perhaps there needs to be a 3rd-party registrar where people can submit their material under particular licenses? It would be a great service for anyone looking for CCed material regardless, and could help to assure people licensing the material that they have someone to go to if there's a dispute.
Admittedly, this is patterned after the WGA's registry, only this version would be transparent-- that is, a registered material would be visible after it's uploaded.
Of course, validating that the submitter is in fact the original copyright owner is another issue, but that's not what the original topic was asking. (An interesting question though-- how do you know that someone who says "this song is distributed under the CC license" really owns the right to do this? Then again, the same issues all apply to the GPL. Is there a CC sourceforge?)
Begs the question != raises the question.
IAMNAL, but this seems like one of those things that will only be settled in court. Since that has not--at least AFAIK--happened yet, it's hard to know what would count as evidence that someone released something under a CC license and then changed the license. Although given that the RIAA has got away with using screenshots as evidence there may be some precedent there.
The situation on wikimedia commons is split into two. First we have a separate signup project called "flickrlickr" which is a separate program run by Eric Moller. He has run the bot on wikimedia acceptable licences (only one of the two at the moment) and then reviewers, such as myself, wade through the 1000 and 1 pictures of cats and dogs to find really HQ pictures, highlights:
r /Highlights
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:FlickrLick
which we then flag and they are uploaded to the commons. Eric knows his program has scanned all the correctly licensed photos - and it has came down to the situation that if a Flickr author asks wikimedia to remove them we may - but we don't have to - we have the program logs and we can prove that they were uploaded at one point under a cc licence, no matter what the Flickr page now says.
For pictures uploaded to wikimedia commons by individual users the situation is a little more blurred. There is now a situation in place where a bot checks most of the pictures and cetifies they are under the correct licence - but that is pretty recent and so there are quite a few older ones which have had licence changes and they just have to be removed as we have no way of proving they once were CC.
In short, at wikimedia commons there has been a major drive to cover our backs to be able to prove that something was uploaded under CC. If an author later changes licences and asks the commons to remove then in most cases we will oblige, but we are now in a position to refuse if we need to (such as a very useful picture etc). I think some folks on the commons got in touch with the folks at Flickr and have tried to persuade them to show a history of licences and there would be no further problems - but so far they haven't obliged.
Some types of media support metadata, and Creative Commons has the means for putting license metadata in such media. See the Creative Commons Tools and Developer Wiki pages for details.
That doesn't cover situations where the media lacks metadata, either because the format doesn't support metadata or the metadata is missing. It also doesn't protect you against claims that you injected the CC metadata against the wishes of a non-CC-using copyright owner. I don't see where the CC metadata includes any sort of digital signature to tie the license to the media and copyright holder in a form that prevents repudiation.
The Busy Coder's Guide to Android Development
If the original author (or, in this case photographer) posted it, then a screen shot that shows the picture and the license (or the CC mark) should probably be enough to protect you. But, remember that only the original author can offer it under a different license -- if somebody else posted it without the author's permission, then the "license" is irrelevant.
Check with an attorney in your state if you want a full analysis.
Finally, I changed my default upload permissions to ©, on the theory that I could always CC-license the pictures after I was finished uploading them.
Who is liable if you redistribute a CC work and discover that the person who placed it under CC was not the rights holder? There's big FUDDY holes in CC that need resolving before I use it.
If someone later comes along and claims they created the content, they will have to prove they created it before you had it signed.
Yet, another possibility is to post a lower quality version of a picture and keep the high-resolution version for cases like this. Or to crop the edges so you can prove you have the original and the person claiming copyright does not.
Aside from the issue of someone changing their mind, there's no way anyone should trust an anonymous assertion of a Creative Commons license. All the time on places like archive.org people contribute work that is not their own and assign it whatever license they happen to like. This happens both with copyrighted works being assigned licenses less restrictive than their author would want and with public domain works being placed under more restrictive licenses.
What is needed is a system to attach metadata containing CC licenses signed by the original author using public key crypto. That way you can irrefutably prove that a particular person licensed a particular file under a particular license. This does not solve the issue of trusting whether that person has the right to so license that work but one could imagine a reputation system (Bob has asserted that 10 Britney Spears songs are CC so no one trusts him anymore) or perhaps legal consequences for making a fraudulent representation.
I believe you have a case when you can prove that the work was produced by virtue of what's in the picture. If it's a picture of your friends, and this guy lives 2000 miles away and has never seen you nor your friends, I think you have a chance.
Slap in a fee of a couple bucks to register copyrighted content
Word count of average novel = ~100,000
Word count of average haiku = ~12
Average Hollywood budget = $xx,000,000
Average novel budget = ~$15,000 (assuming 6 months equivalent to college-educated wage bracket) Average haiku budget = ~$5 (including paper tissues and fizzy drinks)
Now, I may not like haikus in English -- they only sound right rythmically in Japanese, which I don't understand -- but some people do. The point here is that it is the little works that would suffer the most by proprtionally paying the most. A scheme favouring big works favours monoculture.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
An interesting problem. I used to work in a major commercial photo licensing company. You would have a signed receipt with price based on usage, i.e. media, circulation, etc. Even so you would have trouble once in a while concerning conflicts (e.g. use by two companies in the same industry, unpaid use of photo in a corporate or internal presentation, or other claims). The photographer also might want to license photos directly, or a client wants to buy exclusive use, and confirmation has to be made. So imagine a slightly different photo being Creative Commons and then people pick up the mistake, and change the license. Now I am not an expert on CC but if it is like GPL of course if you can prove the timing of your copy then you may be safe in one sense but this does not mean you may not have people angry at you or even trying to stop you from using the photo in some other way. So if you are doing serious work I'd say you should confirm use with the author by email and save and print a copy of it.
On the other hand, the technical problem of proving when you copied something digital regardless of the liscense (GPL, CC, etc.) is a separate, interesting issue. It could be solved by establishing a trusted entity that provides a time-based computational service, returning an encrypted file that can be decrypted to display its metadata. The source text would include a GMT time stamp, the full text of the email and its headers, and a snapshot of the web page offering the media or perhaps a copy of the media with the license embedded in its metadata, plus a hash of the entire file thus created.
This information could be shared with other certifying authorities who could likewise take a snapshot of the relevant web page at the same time and perhaps just store a minimal amount of data such as the hash of the entire file that the first authority is storing. If possible the service ought to be free but it could offer a paid corporate service that provides reports proving clear licensing of all works used in a project.
This type of service would not necessarily solve all your problems, as there is a human element involved as noted above, but in particular if used in combination with a copy of a confirmation email from the content owner, should have a positive effect in establishing online offers of CC and other open licensed media.
It also might be used to prove that you are the owner of freely obtained media on CD/DVD at some time in the past, or even that you have legally copied content for fair use. For example if someone chose to rip his or her cassette tape or purchased CD/DVD collection to his computer, it might be very useful to have a free client application that can very quickly hash up the headers of all the files (not the entirety of the media, that would take too long) and you could upload the thus created digital documentation to a similar service as suggested above, which could either store the fact for you online or give you an encrypted token to prove when you did these rips and why. Personally it is a bit ugly to me that you would have to do this for your own media, but considering the attempts of some organizations to spy on your systems to determine license infractions, it might be a nice way to insulate yourself while also maintaining a private collection for the use of your friends and family. Such an application would be a way to proactively assert your rights and establish digital libraries (in the sense of the old fashioned library that would let you view film strips, videos and yes books). Perhaps it would even help realize legislation asserting the right to creating libraries of digital content.
I looked in here specifically to see if 1) someone had posted this correction, and 2) they got modded down for it. /. hates nothing quite like grammar and language usage flames, no matter how ignorant the person who made the original mistake looks.
I can't wait for the folks who reflexively mod this stuff down to finally reach college age, take a Composition 101 class, and receive some rude surprises.
"Me fail English? That's unpossible!"
Perhaps the GP's use of the title 'dipshit' had something to do with the moderation?
What we need are digital timestamps that incorporate a hash of the digital content item
and a statement of the license terms. These need to use digital signature technology
so that they cannot be repudiated.
The idea would be that if you want to license your content under a create commons license,
then you submit the file of that content to a license certifying server.
A well-known repository of such content (or a search engine setting in google) could
then find all the content that had been so certified.
And you could run a file through a site that would verify that "yep, it had this license on this date."
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
It's why the Free Software Foundation asks for all copyrights on work they use to be signed over to them.
WebCite allows you to grab a page to cite - like Internet Archive but with you in control. You can use this until the site's taken out by the copyrightists.
I'm thinking... acrobat?
you could print to PDF, and use acrobats signature tool to indicate date and time with a checksum
if you modified the page, it would invalidate the 'signature' stamp.. if nothing else it would be proof that that verison
existed at that date and time.. wouldn't it?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Agreed, that's exactly the right way to handle this.
The trickier part would be tracking derivations. So, if you resize a photo that's been CC licensed, the signature no longer matches. I could probably convinced that the person doing the resizing should keep a copy of the original, but that could leave people with a legit license but no proof.
It would be neat to have something analogous to the Copyright Office - the Creative Commons Office. This could be a non-profit responsible for tracking copyright owners' signatures, for verification purposes, archiving originals, and providing unique identifiers for each work that could then be used by licensees for tagging. e.g.
<img src="images/cc_licensed_picture.jpeg" ccorig="1234-5678-9abc-defg-hijk-lmno-pqrs-tuvw">
which smart browsers (e.g. Firefox plug-in) could use for verifying licenses. That's a very ad-hoc syntax; some kind of embed or object would probably be more HTML 4-ish.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Beg the question.
Editor.
Does resizing a photo count as a derivative work? In my opinion, it doesn't, but I have had others tell me that they think it does.