Curiouser and Curiouser!

Curiouser and Curiouser! on creative-commons http://matt.blogs.it/ RSS feed for topic creative-commons Copyright 2006 Matt Mower Squib/0.1 self@mattmower.com self@mattmower.com en-gb Plans and licenses Wed, 15 Jan 2003 23:16:30 +0000 After all the pain I went through last year I can't actually believe I am doing this, however, I am thinking of changing the license for liveTopics from my custom license (the <A href="http://www.novissio.com/Products/liveTopics/liveTopics_Software_License_Ag/livetopics_software_license_ag.html">LSLA</A>) to use a <A href="http://www.creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons</A> license. My current plans are to release two editions of liveTopics tentatively dubbed the Personal and Collaborative editions. liveTopics Personal Edition (PE) will be basically continue to be free for non-commercial use as liveTopics is now.  Of the license available I think the: <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0">Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0</A></BLOCKQUOTE> seems closest to the spirit of the LSLA.  liveTopics PE will include all of the Table of Contents & weblog based features that most people are using now, but it will not include any of the topic mapping functionality. liveTopics Collaborative Edition (CE) will include the ability to create topic maps (in both <A href="http://www.topicmaps.org/xtm/1.0/">XTM</A> and <A href="http://xfml.org/">XFML</A> formats), the ability to do trackback pings on topics (ala Phil Pearsons <A href="http://www.topicexchange.com/">TopicExchange</A>), and be able to output topics in RSS2.0 to enable smart aggregators.  liveTopics CE will support commerical use. I am considering a price tag of $65 (USD) / £40 (UKP) for a CE license. I'd be interested in any and all feedback on these plans.  They are by no means definite (other than that all of those features will be available in some combination, somehow). http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001075.html The price of freedom Thu, 23 Jan 2003 09:31:46 +0000 <BLOCKQUOTE dir=ltr style="MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px"> <A href="http://doc.weblogs.com/2003/01/22#comain">Comain</A>. So I just learned that <A href="http://publicampaign.org/stateoftheunion/index.htm">this is the first political poster</A> released under a <A href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0">Creative Commons license</A>. Good poster too. Gets CC licensing in front of more folks, especially politicos. [<A href="http://doc.weblogs.com/">The Doc Searls Weblog</A>]</BLOCKQUOTE> The poster and the idea are good.  I'm definitely in favour of banning political campaign contributions and financing such things via the state.  It won't waste as much money as people think, because we don't have to give them much.  This will force politicians off the TV, where advertising is expensive, and onto the road where they might actually be forced to meet the people they are claiming to represent.  In particular, if a man is to be president of the United States, then let him walk (or drive) some good proportion of it on his way there. Now I don't believe that just banning contributions will stop the corruption, it's too well entrenched, but it will redress the balance somewhat and that's still a good thing. Another way forward is to do something about the revolving door between business and government.  The UK government is littered with hapless execs who have taken a couple of years out from their boardroom  careers to milk some opportunities out of government for them & their business chums.  Is it any different in America? I agree that government, if it is to be efficient, needs a knowledge of business methods and good practice.  You'll get no argument from me there.  But public service should be about "serving the public" and not "helping one's self," and "lining the pockets of one's friends." Here is my proposal, make of it what you will: I would like to see the formation of a full-time corruption monitoring agency.  It should be state funded with oversight by the Public Accounts Committee.  The agency should be headed by a senior judge who serves a 3 year term and should be elected by the public (from a free list) and not appointed by politicians. Other full-time members of the agency should be drawn from all walks of life including pensioners, business, the press, the judiciary, the police, and members of parliament.  There should be strict controls in place to limit the power of interest, i.e. members of one industry shielding their friends.  Important investigations should have oversight by a jury, drawn at random from the public. The agency should have oversight over all aspects of government business and that includes the prime ministers office, the department of defence and the foreign office.  It should have the power to call anyone to answer, from me right up to the Prime Minister, with refusal carrying the same weight as refusing to appear at the house of commons. Decisions about whether a report is made public or not should be made by the full investigating committee (including the jury if there is one) with the default being that publishing is in the public interest.  The agency should provide access via the web to all materials that are not held to be secret and the head of the agency should publish an annual report. As a final protection this agency should not be directly controlled by parliament.  In particular, changes to it's constitution and it's funding should be ratified by public referendum. All this will cost many millions of pounds to set-up properly but, in the long term, I think it will be worth it. The price of freedom is never free. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001095.html Announcing: ENT v1.0 Easy News Topics for RSS2.0 Fri, 11 Apr 2003 13:59:53 +0100 <A href="http://www.purl.org/NET/ENT/1.0/"><IMG alt="Easy News Topics" src="http://matt.blogs.it/specs/ENT/1.0/ENT10.gif" border=0></A> <A href="http://paolo.evectors.it/2003/04/11.html#a1567">Paolo</A> and I are pleased to announce the release of the first public draft of the <A href="http://www.purl.org/NET/ENT/1.0/">Easy News Topics (ENT) specification</A>.  ENT1.0 is an RSS2.0 module designed to make it really easy to incorporate topics into RSS feeds.  Why would you want to do that?  Because it will help to enable a raft of new, smarter, aggregator products. RSS has become very important to a lot of us and we are starting to see its penetration into the business world as well.  We think that integrating topics will help aggregators applications to scale to meet the future needs of users as well as delivering some very powerful applications.  I've spoken before about the kinds of thing I want my aggregator to do: <UL> <LI>group posts from many feeds by interest. <LI>filtering posts I don't want to see <LI>scoring & promote posts <LI>recombine different feeds dynamically.</LI></UL> I hope that ENT might help bring all these things a little closer.  We also see a role for classification in bringing new ways to order, view, and, search weblog data. We are offering ENT1.0 to the community (under a <A href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/">Creative Commons License</A>) in the hope that we can foster these applications and many more, that we haven't even begun to think of yet. I will soon be releasing to the public the next version of liveTopics which will be ENT compliant.  At that point any Radio user will be able to easily add topic metadata to their RSS feed.  We hope that there will soon be many applications available to make use of it. We look forward to your comments. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001375.html Licensed to aggregate Sat, 07 Feb 2004 23:41:47 +0000 I have been encouraged to think about how copyright content works with RSS. For example I publish my weblog under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons</a> license however you couldn't tell that from my <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/rss.xml">RSS feed</a>. Does that mean that my feed is not under a CC license? I don't, but I guess that it's confusing at best. What should an application reading my feed and not my blog do? What rules should it apply? I didn't find any solutions to this question searching Google just now so I've started thinking of one myself. Obviously if anyone knows of solution already in use I'd be grateful to hear about it. My first attempt at a solution is to propose a simple new RSS 2.0 extension for Licensing. This extension would add just one new element <code><license></code> which can be applied at both <code><channel></code> and <code><item></code> level. Using such a mechanism a license can be applied to the feed and overriden for specific items if required (although this would require more control in the editing environment). For example one might apply a <a href="http://www.primarilypublicdomain.org/">Primarily Public Domain</a> license to their feed, but override this on a specific item for which they wished to retain the copyright. The next question is what the content of such an element should be. Creative commons licenses have a useful URL which it would be helpful to include. Other (or future) types of license may also have a similar arrangement. Copyright notices on the other hand do not generally have an addressable resource. Therefore I propose the use of an optional <code>src</code> attribute which can point at any addressable resource related to the license. Since copyright is (as far as I understand it) a binary concept I propose another attribute, <code>copyright</code> which has a default value of <code>true</code>. To remove the copyright the attribute should be specified with a value of <code>false</code>. The content of the element then can be an arbitrary string. A copyright notice in the case of a copyright work, or some other useful descriptive string. Some examples: <ul><li><code><license>Copyright (c) 2004 Matt Mower</license></code></li> <li><code><license copyright="false" src="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0">Creative Commons - By Attribution, Non-Commerical, No Derivative works</license></code></li> </ul> Any takers? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001855.html Licensed to aggregate (pt #2) Tue, 10 Feb 2004 08:00:08 +0000 I have received a couple of comments to my earlier <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/2004/02/08.html#a1315">piece</a> about licensing & RSS. Among others Phil Ringnalda pointed me at the <a href="http://backend.userland.com/creativeCommonsRssModule">Creative Commons RSS Module</a> authored by <a href="http://www.scripting.com/">Dave Winer</a> in Dec 2002. The CC module is pretty much the same solution as I was proposing in that it seems to be a start in the right direction. However neither it, nor my own suggestion, answer all the questions in a way I can appreciate (e.g. as Phil points out, what is covered by the license: text only? images? etc...), so i'm going to keep chipping at this. A commentor, <a href="http://www.lulop.com/">Lorenzo</a>, has suggested that <blockquote>Copyright is a "state" and licensing is an "action" made possible by the state.</blockquote>I kind of disagree with this statement but mainly on terminological grounds. I hope we can cut through that by agreeing that the central point is rights. Who has them? What uses do they permit? It seems to me that a Copyright statement reserves all rights relating to making copies (& derivative works) to the author who can then make exceptions on a case-by-case basis. As in the case where an author grants their publisher the right to make copies for sale. Hence an RSS feed with a copyright notice shouldn't be read (copied) unless you consider the act of offering feed to be an implicit agreement by the author to do so. Of course from a software perspective implicit rights can be problematic, especially when they are not immutable or well understood. For an RSS feed with a copyright statement what rights are actually on offer? People commonly republish content from posts they have aggregated either whole or in part. How do they know they have the right to do so? Then you have some interesting anomalies when software gets in the way. For example, my <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/">weblog</a> has a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/">Creative Commons</a> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0">license</a>, yet my <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/rss.xml">feed</a> is Copyright. I guess Radio is automatically adding the copyright notice, I don't know how to make it stop. What am I telling you? Alternatively, and I guess this may be common, Phil Ringnalda's blog doesn't have any kind of license at all, neither does his feed. Can I assume Phil intends all his material to be public domain? If i'm not clear that this is the intension how can my software be? Creative Commons offer a range of licenses which offer the right to copy, or make derivative works, with certain restrictions such as share alike and non commercial use only. Primarily Public Domain takes this a step further in granting unlimited rights with exceptions being, if you'll excuse the pun, the exception. Maybe it's my developer "tunnel vision" at work but this looks very similar to the common model of permissions adopted in software everywhere: <ul> <li>include * except A, B, C,...</li> <li>exclude * except R, S, T,...</li> </ul> where A, B, etc.. are not users or hosts but specific actions, by identified individuals, in specific circumstances. For most personal news aggregators I guess none of this matters much. If someone publishes a feed, and you're just reading it, then whats the harm? Unless of course you weren't supposed to have the URL to the feed. But that's a different issue. However for aggregators like <a href="http://w4.evectors.it/">K-Collector</a> and users who are reposting content it's a different matter. For example K-Collector doesn't mess with the content of posts, but it does republish them in a new context. If K-Collector has a better Google page rank than the author then we even begin to suck traffic away from them based upon their own material! (To be clear I am only talking about the public K-Collector portal <a href="http://w4.evectors.it/">W4</a>. This is an untypical use of <a href="http://www.evectors.com/itkcollector/">K-Collector</a> which is designed for use within organisations. But the point still stands. And what about <a href="http://www.feedster.com/">Feedster</a>?) As ambitious, semi-automated, software like K-Collector become more common then a reasonable, dependable, system of rights is going to be required. To my way of thinking the <a href="http://backend.userland.com/creativeCommonsRssModule">Creative Commons RSS Module</a>, whilst a start in the right direction, addresses a necessary, but not sufficient, subset of the goals. What do we do to take it further? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001864.html Lessig++ RIAA-- Free culture = more creativity Tue, 25 May 2004 08:36:57 +0100 <blockquote><a href="http://chocnvodka.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2004/5/24/75514.html">Something for Nothing in fifteen words</a>. For the terminally short of attention out there, here's my <a href="http://chocnvodka.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2004/5/24/75489.html">Free Culture audiobook essay</a> in 15 words: Lessig++ RIAA-- Free culture = more creativity New publishing models Download, read, buy = sales up Discuss! [<a href="http://chocnvodka.blogware.com/blog">Chocolate and Vodka</a>] </blockquote> Suws been doing a lot of thinking about copyright, free culture, and the impact of releasing your content under different licenses so that others may build derivative works.  The <a href="http://chocnvodka.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2004/5/24/75489.html">full essay</a> makes for interesting reading. Something I shall be watching is how this model works as it evolves and how it works in general.  So far we are talking about a very few cases and the financials are not well understood.  As an author whose primary motivation is not financial I can see how this makes a lot of sense.  But what if you really do want the money? Maybe I should read Free Culture ;-) http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00002265.html