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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.
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?)
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.
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.
the problem is that screenshots are nearly worthless as a proof - you can modify them digitally leaving no trace of the modification, and without some trust system it's impossible to sign the screenshot proving it wasn't doctored.
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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.