Curiouser and Curiouser! on public-domain http://matt.blogs.it/ RSS feed for topic public-domain Copyright 2006 Matt Mower Squib/0.1 self@mattmower.com self@mattmower.com en-gb Licensed to aggregate (pt #2) Tue, 10 Feb 2004 08:00:08 +0000 <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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 <em>rights</em>. Who has them? What uses do they permit?</p> <p>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.</p> <p>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?</p> <p>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?</p> <p>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?</p> <p>Creative Commons offer a range of licenses which offer the right to copy, or make derivative works, with certain restrictions such as <em>share alike</em> and <em>non commercial use only</em>. Primarily Public Domain takes this a step further in granting unlimited rights with exceptions being, if you'll excuse the pun, the exception.</p> <p>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 <em>specific actions, by identified individuals, in specific circumstances.</em></p> <p>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.</p> <p>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!</p> <p><em>(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>?)</em></p> <p>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?</p> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001867.html