Slashdot has an interesting discussion of a question I’ve often wondered about: What does non-commercial mean in a Creative Commons license? If your blog runs some ads, does that mean you can’t use a photo CC-ed for non-commercial use? CC-friendly BoingBoing is the possible offender in this case.

BoingBoing has removed the image to respect the author’s wishes, and has posted a brief notice acknowledging ambiguity about “non-commercial.” I think that’s the right way to handle it. But I’d love more clarity about this. I’d be fine with commercial entities using a photo I CC’ed, so long as they weren’t directly making money from it, because I think the culture of sharing is improved with that policy. But, it is a knottier problem than it would be if CC were more explicit about what the intended norms were for commercial use.

[Later that day:] Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing responded to my tweeting of the Slashdot discussion with three tweets:

Slashdot post is fake. Did you know the photographer is a flickr friend of @doctorow’s and namechecks him in the photo?

the post by the slashdot anonymous troll is NOT by the proprietor of the image. But by a troll.

They’re trolling because the very post was written by Cory, a longtime CC activist, & post said “I’m going offline for a month”

Thanks, Xeni

3 Comments »

The chair of Australias Government 2.0 Taskforce, Nicholas Gruen, is very happy that the government has accepted his groups proposals, starting with making Creative Commons CC-BY the default license for government documents. Disclosure: I was on the advisory group for the report.

1 Comment »

Jeff Goldenson at Harvard Law Library’s Digital Lab (Disclosure: I’ve just started consulting there) has been thinking about the benefits and pitfalls of embedding metadata into JPG images. That happens already, and some of it can be quite useful, although some can be a little creepy.

He and I were talking and began to wonder if there’d be utility in embedding Creative Commons license info into JPGs. So, let’s say you post a snapshot and you want to make it available under a Creative Commons license that allows people to reuse it so long as they attribute it to you and agree to let others reuse it under the same license. That information — including your preferred attribution and a link to the page you want it linked to — would be hidden within the JPG file.

Why bother? Because it would mean that the license info travels with the image. Otherwise, the chain of licenses and attributions can too easily be lost as B republishes a snap posted by A, and C republishes B, etc. The game of License Gossip just about ensures the chain of license info will not be unbroken.

At least as important, if this metadata were inserted in a standardized form, applications could begin using it, making the CC license both more useful and more visible, thus encouraging more people to use it. For example, someone could write a Firefox extension that would insert under any CC’ed image a line such as: “Share this image. Just be sure to include this attribution: (cc) [name] [license],” etc.

For this idea to have any effect, someone (Creative Commons?) would have to promulgate the standardized format for the embedded info, someone would have to write a metadata editor/inserter, and apps would have to add features take advantage of it. It’d help, for example, if Flickr were to let us set a preference for embedding the metadata into any photo we post there under a CC license.

Down sides? Well, the idea is unlikely to take off. And I suppose there’s a chance that the Big Content industry would start to insert their copyright info using the same mechanism, and thus would have something like a “broadcast flag” with which they could try to beat up browser makers and others who make create apps that display images: “Whenever your app displays images with copyright metadata, we insist you turn off the Copy entry on the context menu.” (IANAL, but I believe such a demand would have no legal basis, but since when does that have anything to do with it?)

Care to punch holes in this idea? Point to people who have already done it?

5 Comments »