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Creative Commons Includes GPL And LGPL Metadata

Posted by timothy on Sun Feb 08, 2004 01:39 PM
from the self-documenting dept.
GNU is Not Unix
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."
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  • Would be great for P2P (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mrdaveb (239909) on Sunday February 08 2004, @01:45PM (#8219586) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:Would be great for P2P (Score:2, Insightful)

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

      • Re:Would be great for P2P (Score:4, Interesting)

        by TrentC (11023) <jelmore49 AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday February 08 2004, @03:14PM (#8220125) Homepage
        You can embed a link to a webpage with the license information into an MP3 or image file. A validator would check that the page exists, and that the licensing terms match. Verify [aetherial.net] is a Mac OS X application that does exactly this.

        While this doesn't prevent fraudulent sites ("Why yes, I am Paul McCartney and I am dedicating The White Album to the public domain"), a friendly e-mail to the webmaster (or at worst, DMCA takedown letter -- wow, using the DMCA for good?) removes the fraudulent page, and the license no longer validates.

        Jay (=
      • Just because it's commercial doesn't mean it isn't GPL'd. In fact, all free software licenses allow you to distribute works licensed under them for a fee. Perhaps you meant proprietary works being mislabeled as though they were GPL'd, thus attempting to deceive people into believing that the work is licensed under the GPL when it actually isn't. I imagine this could be solved with a competitive set of organizations who compete on accuracy as well as speed and number of returned hits.

  • Moz Plugin (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Xoder (664531) <slashdot.xoder@fastmail@fm> on Sunday February 08 2004, @01:46PM (#8219588) Homepage
    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.
  • Yes, does anyone know of a search engine where you can search for GPL based software?

    For some odd reason GPL software is always of 'better quality'.

  • GPL and CC -- Can they co-exist? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dexterpexter (733748) on Sunday February 08 2004, @02:03PM (#8219695) Journal
    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?

    • Re:GPL and CC -- Can they co-exist? (Score:5, Informative)

      by LostCluster (625375) * on Sunday February 08 2004, @02:19PM (#8219807) Homepage
      The main Creative Commons licenses are based on the three questions on this page [creativecommons.org].

      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.
    • Also, the GPL and the CC licenses refer to different things. The GPL covers source code, and the CC licenses cover content.
      • The GPL has been used for for documentation as well (as have other software licenses; for example the license used by the FreeBSD documentation project is virtually identical to the one used for the system itself). It is just a pretty silly idea, because the requirements, and what should be considered appropriate use, are very different.

    • Well, their comic "A Spectrum of Rights" [creativecommons.org] 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 [creativecommons.org] 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 (=

      • 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 d
    • 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".
    • Software that is licensed under the GPL does not have to be released to the public.

      All that the GPL really says is that what you're selling/giving away is the source (any available binaries are provided as a convenience), along with the same rights to that source that you had.

      So, I could modify Linux and sell it to you as long as I sold you the source. You could take what I sold you and
      • contribute it to the main kernel tree
      • rebrand and resell it
      • modify it for your own needs and keep it all to yourself
      • et

  • limitations of CC (Score:4, Insightful)

    by akb (39826) on Sunday February 08 2004, @02:12PM (#8219752)
    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.
    • 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.
    • Perhaps, but DRM systems prevent you to copy, even if works are in the public domain. It is not just either, and I don't trust a private central clearing house to provide free cleareance for free works (and a governemental one will be not free either, because of taxes).

    • Re:limitations of CC (Score:5, Informative)

      by afree87 (102803) on Sunday February 08 2004, @03:33PM (#8220211) Homepage Journal
      This problem has already been solved [creativecommons.org] 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.

    • Yes, it does (Score:4, Interesting)

      by TrentC (11023) <jelmore49 AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday February 08 2004, @03:46PM (#8220283) Homepage
      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 [creativecommons.org] 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 (=

  • Brazilian Portuguese translation of GPL (Score:5, Informative)

    by Via_Patrino (702161) on Sunday February 08 2004, @02:14PM (#8219766)
    IIRC it was translated for portuguese because the brazilian government is promoting Free Software and contracts in english are not valid in Brazil.
    • ALL well and good if you speak Portuguese - but what of the bazillion other earthlings who don't , but would still like to license under the GPL via the CC License Markup Scheme?
      • ...but it is not "official". The only official version is the English one. Basicly, you can direct them to their localized variant, and inform them the English licence is supposed to be exactly identical to that one.

        The reason it isn't used in other languages is due to the legal minefield of trying to ensure that two licences are in fact exactly the same under the letter of the law, each definition of the words meaning the same, no sentence can be interpreted differently.

        It could be done, but the resultin

  • Underground music and CC (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 08 2004, @02:17PM (#8219796)
    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.
    • Slight correction. What mainstream America GETS is marketed music, but it's not always what they WANT. It's all they hear about, so it's all they know. Yeah, that might be splitting hairs but it's an important one.

    • ... it is a start in making such an underground force...

      An important step forward, yes. The "start," no. (There can only be one "start" -- anything after the first is not a start but a continuation. Thus, "a start" can only logically be read as "the start.")

      Even the EFF's Open Audio License (for which they've apparently dropped support, in order to support the Creative Commons effort), which was the basis for the Open Music Registry, which itself predated Creative Commons, was not the "start" of buildi

  • Share alike compatibility (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DOsinga (134115) <{douwe} {at} {oberon.nl}> on Sunday February 08 2004, @02:18PM (#8219799) Homepage Journal
    One thing that keeps bugging me, is the compatibility between share alike licenses. The travel content on world66 is licensed under the creative commons license, but we cannot use content from the wikipedia, because of license incompatibility. And if they were compatible, theirs would probably also include a requirement to include the license information, which could lead to the situation where a document based on various sources gets a long list of licenses used.

    - - - - - - -
    World66, the largest open content travel site [world66.com]

  • A problem with RDF metadata (Score:4, Informative)

    by MichaelCrawford (610140) on Sunday February 08 2004, @04:06PM (#8220418) Homepage Journal
    Some online communities do not allow you to embed metadata in your posts. I licensed Links to Tens of Thousands of Legal Music Downloads [kuro5hin.org] under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs license, and originally included the RDF in the markup.

    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 [creativecommons.org] 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?

    • Just because you can't place RDF metadata everywhere you post an article doesn't mean you shouldn't in its canonical location, which presumibly you always link to. I don't see metadata at http://www.goingware.com/tips/legal-downloads.html [goingware.com], nor a button, though the notice you give on that page is perfectly adequate legally (but IANAL).
      • I thought about whether I should use the RDF in the original copy of the article, but decided against it because I wanted other people to be able to copy it to other message boards.

        Likely they would have the same trouble with it kuro5hin did, and whoever was trying to make the copy would be sorely confused.

        • That sounds like a rather lame excuse. I doubt any forums would allow a complete copy&paste of all of the html on that page. It includes html, head, style, and body elements and a doctype declaration, not to mention images. The RDF may be placed anywhere in the page.

  • Then there's the old search engine style... (Score:3, Informative)

    by NiKnight3 (532580) on Sunday February 08 2004, @04:44PM (#8220643) Homepage
    Then of course there are sites like MacBand [macband.com], 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 [blogchalking.tk].

  • been saying this... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ImaLamer (260199) <john@lamar.gmail@com> on Sunday February 08 2004, @04:57PM (#8220701) Homepage Journal
    I've been saying for a long time scientific work (Physics videos, math tutor programs, etc) should be released unto p2p.

    Discovery or whomever (PBS, it is our content America!) should donate third run shows that can be downloaded and viewed at home or school.

    Doesn't need to be explained more than that. Give the shows a month to be aired on TV and then the History Channel hands them over to the net. If they release it free as in beer we will respect their trademarks.

    Like I said, I've suggested it before and have written a paper on it and posted it here before (under this Login I believe).

  • Heh (Score:5, Funny)

    by r00zky (622648) on Sunday February 08 2004, @06:05PM (#8221101)
    Look at the different outputs in page 2 [creativecommons.org] of the license generator:
    - Human readable
    - Lawyer readable
    - Machine readable

    Good to know lawyers aren't humans, i was starting to worry :P
  • Great idea ... and surprising how many pages have CC info.

    A nice feature for the next version would be mozilla-editor tool that easily generates the license meta-data.
  • especially manuals for commercial products. Manuals are full of information and are in some ways "ads" for a company's products. Chiral Software's manual for its WAP server software [chiralsoftware.net] is licensed under the Creative Commons system.

    • Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What you call "viral" is what CC calls "share alike". It's what I call "copyleft".

    • Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Informative)

      by qtp (461286) on Sunday February 08 2004, @07:23PM (#8221575) Journal
      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 [creativecommons.org] that is very much similar to the GPL.

    • Fortunatly, this would only apply to one constitution. There are ~120 others to choose from

      OK, not all of them are expressed as a formal law, and many are worse than the USAsian one, but it should be easy to find one that has everything that someone raised in western civilization would expect (democracy, free speech, innocent until proven guilty, no death penalty, basic human rights granted, ...) and with a sane balance of rights between the rights of a creator and the interests of the general public.

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