Archives for June 2005

News from the US Supreme Court:

June 27, 2005 by Michael Boyle

News from the US Supreme Court:

Grokster, StreamCast Lose. From the post on SCOTUSblog: “In a decision announced by Justice David H. Souter, the Court said: ‘We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties’ – that is, computer users using free downloading software.”

I’m no legal analyst, but it strikes me that the specification that the distributor of the device that may be used for infringing purposes must promote such usage in order to be liable is very important, and will likely precipitate further legal battles before the issue is settled. AFAIK all such distributors caution users against such infringing usage.

Keepgoing.org:

June 27, 2005 by Michael Boyle

Keepgoing.org:

The Big Fish. Subhed: “Ten years later, the story of Suck.com, the first great website.” It is nice to see CTHEORY cited there. While Carl busy doing the CTHEORY website, I was working at the other end with the editors, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, in my first net job.

Doc Searls in IT Garage:

June 25, 2005 by Michael Boyle

Doc Searls in IT Garage:

AdTension. “My main point here is that we need to get out of the advertiser-centered frame of mind about how markets for information work. We need to start imagining the markeptlace as it exists now, and wants to exist, in the online world. This is a marketplace where customers are participants, and not just consumers. Where they are no longer just a mass of passive ‘eyeballs’.”

Better late than never:

June 25, 2005 by Michael Boyle

Better late than never:

spurred on by my post yesterday, I have finally licenced the content of mikel.org under a Creative Commons Canada by-nc-sa license. It was really just inertia that kept me from doing it before, or at least since November 2004 when Canadian CC licences were first made available.

Wish list? Movable Type makes it easy to create a US license right in the site preferences. Frankly, though, I think it’s obnoxious that Six Apart has a US-centric feature embedded in their software when International versions do in fact exist. I also wish the Creative Commons Canada people had: a) made it easier to download the appropriate graphic and store it locally (with instructions for those who don’t know how); and, b) I wish they’d included size attributes in the image tag itself. Small details, but important ones.

Karl Dubost wrote an excellent

June 24, 2005 by Michael Boyle

Karl Dubost wrote an excellent

post on his wonderful La Grange site that poses some questions about the intersection between Creative Commons licenses and microformat services such as Technorati and others. The central question: do the analysis services provided by Technorati (and Google and others) infringe upon some Creative Commons licensing schemes, which explicitly prohibit commercial use of content?

It’s a tough question, for sure, and one whose answer will only really come over the course of time. For my part, I think when we look at such questions we have to be very careful to look at exactly what kinds of things services like this are actually doing with content, whether under CC license or traditionally copyrighted.

So, when aggregation and analysis services are “using” someone’s content, what does that really mean? Does it mean they are in fact “republishing” text or images elsewhere? Or is it more a question of aggregating texts from many sources and in that way using the fact that a text exists and not the text itself? On the other side, what does “Non Commercial” mean? Certainly it means that I couldn’t, for instance, take a text written by someone else and publish it in a book that I publish for profit. But does it mean that I can not, in the course of my commercial activity, even read the text? It seems obvious that it does not – but has the question been answered “officially” yet? Likewise, am I allowed to note the fact that the text and a certain point of view expressed in the text exists, and use that fact as data aggregated with other similar data points?

Without answering those questions, I think that a couple of issues jump right out. First of all, I believe (can anyone confirm?) that CC licenses are machine-readable. If not they should be, and I think it would be a boon to the community for notable companies working in this area – Technorati and Google, for example – to step up and detail exactly what they will do with content and how they will automatically process the various licenses that are out there. And second, I think the community of “content providers” (that would be bloggers but also other publishers, photographers and really all creators) should sustain a wide-ranging discussion on these issues on an ongoing basis.

Lastly, it is very likely that people have already worked out a lot of these issues – so I apologize for my ignorance of existing answers.