April 9, 2003
Random Remarks on Creative Commons and the Public Domain
1. So, I’ve been using the attribution/non-commercial/share-alike license from Creative Commons. I had been using the last two to encourage further dissemination of non-commercial works. I had also been using the non-commercial one because I’m still not sure how I’d feel about, say, someone compiling all my blog postings and selling them as a book (not like that would ever happen, but…). I don’t really mind limited commercial uses of my work; but, I’m still unsure if what sort of line I’d draw.
I’ve been trying to think more about this since the Robert Helmer of the Daily Whirl contacted me about adding my site. Marty Schimmer got pretty angry about the use of his feeds for commercial purposes (though he gave an important clarification later about bandwidth costs). Now, I’ve got no problem with the limited use that Daily Whirl’s making of my site. Frankly, I’m not even sure I could say that they’re legally doing anything wrong; they’re just using my headlines, and they’re linking right back to me. Linking is still a pretty murky territory, so I don’t know if this is the case. Does putting an RSS feed out there make this sort of linkage more ok? (Using my headlines and linking back to me seems quite like Ticketmaster v. Tickets.com, but I might be wrong.)
In any case, I realized through this experience that adding the non-commercial/share-alike portions of my CC license might go too far in undermining the purpose of my attribution qualifier. I want my stuff to be distributed freely and easily, but I’m not sure I want to stop people from doing so just because they’re got ad-banners on their site.
Anyone else run up against similar conflicts?
2. So I’ve been getting a little nostalgic recently. I’ve wanted to watch Fraggle Rock, which is one of the few TV shows I remember watching as a kid. It was an incredible Jim Henson production, plenty of cute songs and very, very silly characters. I can still remember some of the songs, or at least some of the funny noises and motions those puppets used to make. It’d be nice to see it again.
But I can’t find it anywhere. It’s not on Hallmark/Odyssey Channel any more. It’s not on DVD, and all the VHSs are out of stock at Amazon. I don’t even think they sell the toys, view-masters, books, music, or other collectibles any more. However, there are plenty of people selling illegitimate DVD/VCDs on eBay.
So, if the copyright owners don’t want to make money off this stuff any more, why can’t those illegitimate copies be legitimate ones? Again, what’s the point of bottling this stuff up for another century if the copyright owners don’t want to make money off it? I’d gladly buy DVDs if they produced them; I’d be less glad buying VHS, but I’d probably just grumble and fork over the money anyway.
I’m not saying, Mr. Rehnquist, that I just want stuff for free; I’m saying, give me a way to legitimately acquire it. The public domain is key to preserving this stuff. What’s the point of letting it die?
Filed by Derek Slater at 4:07 pm under General news
5 Comments
Sounds to me like you want a more open (CC attribution) license for the URL, title, etc. while keeping your current license for the main content.
But you’ve just got one RSS feed, and it’s all in there.
I can easily set up a re-feed of your blog that includes content, title and link. This is non-commercial, automatically provides attribution and makes no attempt to license anything. Bandwidth usage on your server from this is roughly similar to one mildly-obsessive human reader (IIRC, a hit to the rss file every hour or 4…) OTOH, if I charged people to access that content, I think you’d have good reason to be upset.
But, as you said, using the title and links for commercial purposes doesn’t bother you.
IIRC, generally the title, author name and unique id (isbn, issn, page#) and other “meta” information is either covered by “fair use” or possibly even outright non-copyrightable.
“Article content on this site is under a [creative commons license / cc:by-nc-sa]. Article titles are under a different [creative commons license / cc:by-sa]. URLs to articles may be considered public domain.”?
(Note on the livejournal example: I had to go through some extra effort for that view, the normal view for somebody who’s not “subscribed” to that specific rss feed is disclaimered and less convenient)
IMO, there is de-facto permission (of some sort; assumable from having an RSS feed. Much like one can generally assume permission to copy a web-page to a single computer and render (modify!) the HTML into a viewable format based on the simple fact that the material in question is provided via a public HTTP server with no access controls. Part of the problem (in both cases) is when something goes up without the knowledge of the human. Many “blogs” will create an RSS feed automatically, and there’s been cases of web-servers serving information when companies didn’t even know the software in question had a web server.
Instead of having a second feed, why include the whole article content in the description tags of the rss file at all? Are you using it to build the site pages? Why not just have the single feed with titles and links, and make the license attribution only? (Although I agree that the CC license may be irrelevant with regard to titles and links….)
Eric–just saw your “falsch freiheit – Friends” Nice work…. Sweet site. So I guess Derek has a reason to keek the whole content in the rss after all, since some are pulling it…
Bob: just a clarification: I did almost nothing to make that “falsch freiheit – Friends” thing work; that’s all handled fairly automatically by the “LiveJournal” software. I pretty much just fed the software some RSS feeds URLs and clicked a few buttons and that got created. Brad Fitz and the other LiveJournal folks deserve the credit for making the software.
There’s also desktop software that does pretty much the same thing, but with a UI designed specifically for news, such as Straw, NetNewsWire, and FeedReader.
I’m not big on desktop rss readers, Eric. They use too many cpu resources when you probably already have your browser open anyway, and could just be using it, and too much bandwidth (you might be pulling down huge files just to get a few tidbits of info)…. Back in the day, I was a beta tester for Carmen’s Headline Viewer, which was magnificent for its time (this was 1999 or 2000 I think) and probably greatly improved now, but I always just wanted to just get that information easier yet….
You’re right, LiveJournal looks very interesting… I’m going off to explore it further now…. Thanks