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."

Would be great for P2P

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

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 (=

Moz Plugin

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.

GPL Search Engine?

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?

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?

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.

Creative Commons offers a spectrum of licenses

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 (=

limitations of CC

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

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

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

IIRC it was translated for portuguese because the brazilian government is promoting Free Software and contracts in english are not valid in Brazil.

Underground music and CC

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.

Share alike compatibility

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

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?

Then there's the old search engine style...

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...

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

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

MozCC Rox

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.

It's great for software manuals

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.

Already working on this

There are already good projects working on this license! Just take a look at iRATE [sourceforge.net]. (They even do mention our efforts at their blog [creativecommons.org]).

"5 February 2004 Perth, Western Australia

New Zealander Anthony Jones announced the third minor release of the iRATE radio client today. iRATE radio provides users with a powerful new way to find and download free, legal music online. Users rate tracks based on their tastes. The iRATE server then selects other tracks to send to the user from a database of over 50,000 freely downloadable songs by correlating the user's ratings with other users and finding people with similar tastes.

Unlike streaming audio, iRATE saves the tracks to the user's hard drive. This means that playback is smoother, without the typical problems associated with streaming media, such as high bandwidth usage.

iRATE radio is written in Java, and is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Windows users can easily get up and running with iRATE radio using Sun's Java Web Start and Internet Explorer. For other browsers on Windows and Linux, users may need to download and install Java WebStart separately. There are also native Debian, Mandrake, and Redhat Linux packages available. Mac users will be pleased to hear that a disk image (.DMG) file for OS X will be released within a week.

This release features a new, more intuitive user interface, a refined track selection algorithm, and better download performance. Other improvements include a new icon (following the recent icon contest), tool tips, ID3 tag display, artist's website link support, playlist management, and many others.

Since the project's registration at SourceForge in March 2003, iRATE radio has gathered an increasing number of developers. The user base now numbers over 8,000 individuals. However, there is still a lot of work to be done. Jones recently made an announcement to the development mailing list detailing thirteen focus areas for improvement. These included translations, native playback (for improved decoding performance), better server-side track selection, multimedia key binding support, audio prompting, more publicity, and several others.

The iRATE radio website is at http://irate.sourceforge.net/"

Re:Hmm...

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

Re:What good is this...

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.

Re:What were they thinking?

Well, you may very well argue with the logic but note that none of these actions have anything to do with the GPL - it's a politically motivated decision by the project leaders that seems to be based largely on a dislike for the APSL and apples DMCA-based shutdown of iDVD extensions.

Re:What were they thinking?

I don't know about you but I'd follow the Kool-Aid Man to the ends of the earth.

Re:Hmm...

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.