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Copyright registries and similar animals
Greg Grossmeier, June 18th, 2008
Panel Participants:
Rich Pearson – Attributor.com
Pierre Gerard – Jamendo
Robert Kaye – Music Brainz
Devon Copley – Noank Media
Joe Benso – Registered Commons
Javier Prenafeta – Safe Creative
Aaron Swartz – OpenLibrary
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Rich Pearson – Attributor.com
Attributor is aimed to be “A GPS for your content.” It provides a database matching service to detect licensed material on the web with accompanying data about its use (if there were ads on the page, how much was used, and how it was used). It aims to be an interoperable and also open to all rights holders, multiple licenses, and associations.
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Pierre Gerard – Jamendo
Jamendo boasts that it is the biggest online free music community with over 10,000 albums under CC license including 300 new albums per week in over 60 countries. Consumers can pay if you wish for the content, usually $5 and Jamendo keeps 50cents. Also, Jamendo shares advertising revenue along a 50/50 scheme with the artists.
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Robert Kaye – Music Brainz
Started MusicBrainz after the only other option was no longer available. It aims to be a music metadata repository along with the ability to automatically tag personal music collections. The way their metadata database is built is through community generated and corrected means.
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Devon Copley – Noank Media
Brings about a new way of dealing with licensing music online. They are trying to be the in-between bargainer for Publishers and End Users enabling third party companies to buy blanket use of sets of songs for customers. By doing this they fill the gap between CC+ and full copyright. Their supported licenses include CC licenses, their own license, and public domain.
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Joe Benso – Registered Commons
The Registered Commons service aims to provide a registery of digtal works of any kind while preferring CC licensed work. They also time stamp each item and verify the author’s identity.
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Javier Prenafeta – Safe Creative
This service allows authors to self register their works and do management of that data to ensure that a particular version of a work (image, video, audio) is associated with a specific license. This enables users to have more confidence in the fact their use of a work is legally permissable.
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Aaron Swartz – OpenLibrary
The OpenLibrary aims to create one page for every book, ever. This is done through a sort of wikipedia-style method by allowing users to modify metadata and correct mistakes. Along with user supplied metadata the OpenLibrary is also given high quality information directly from publishers to insert into the database.
No Comments »Digital copyright registry technology landscape, challenges, opportunities
Brian Rowe, June 18th, 2008
Mike Linksvayer – Vice President, Creative Commons
Why do we need a registry?
Assurance that license claims are correct
Without a registry it is easier for works to become orphaned
Registries enable payment to find its way to artist
What makes a digital copyright registry?
It is digital!
Not only motivated by registration
Scales up
Global
Who wants a registry?
License management orgs
User media orgs
Collective rights management orgs
Cultural Heritage groups
Academics
Creators and Users
Who is building registries?
Registered Commons
SafeCreative
Open Library
Jamendo
Noank Media
Attributor
Flickr
Last.FM
Among others
Best Quote “We believe in the Net, not a cenralized, Soviet-style information bank controlled by a single organization” old CC FAQ.
(photo Joi Ito, CC:BY)
No Comments »liblicense packages for Ubuntu and Debian
asheesh, June 16th, 2008
I’ve finally finished creating and updating the liblicense packages for Debian and Ubuntu.
For Debian, just make sure your system is set to pull from Debian sid (”unstable”) – the packages are in the official archives; take a look at http://packages.debian.org/liblicense! (Thanks to Mako for sponsoring my upload.)
For Ubuntu, for the time being, you should use the Creative Commons
repository. Information on that is at http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/packages/. A short summary:
deb http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/packages hardy main
Add that to sources.list, do “sudo aptitude install liblicense-python”, and then you can “import liblicense” to your heart’s content!
Because the packages are in the central Debian repository, they will propagate to Ubuntu automatically for Ubuntu’s next release, and you won’t have to maintain any special configuration to be able to install them.
Nathan Y. asked a question: Why “liblicense2″? This is because of ABI versioning – if you write a C application that links to liblicense and upload that to the Debian archive, it is crucial that if the liblicense library gets updated, the user of your application not need to recompile your app. For that reason, “ABI versioning” is a promise that so long as the library has version 2.x, any program built with an earlier or equal version of 2.x will have the library functions appear in the same place in memory. That way, the compiled-in assumptions about those functions’ location will not be violated. If it were to be violated, the application would quickly crash with a “Segmentation fault” or “Access violation,” or it might even try to execute the wrong liblicense function.
Now I need to work on the Fedora liblicense packaging bug….
No Comments »Summer Internship : email notification for Semantic Media Wiki
Steren Giannini, June 10th, 2008
First I would like to introduce myself. I’m Steren Giannini, a French student from Ecole Centrale de Lyon, a college of general engeneering. I’m working as a tech intern at Creative Commons SF. It’s for me the first time I cross the Atlantic, so this stay in San Francisco is a real adventure. I’m very proud to do my part in the CC revolution.
During my school years, I created websites for companies (to make some spending money ;) ) and I recently worked on Inkscape : I’ve been enhancing the Live Path Effect system.
The first goal of my project at CC is to improve the internal task and project tracking system. It uses Semantic MediaWiki. Today tasks can be created and assigned to users. What I have to do is to add email notification to the system.
This means :
- send email to the assigned users when a task changes
- send “reminder” emails to assigned users when due dates are approaching.
So yesterday I started by reading some documentation about Semantic Web in general, RDF specification, MediaWiki and Semantic MediaWiki. Then I installed MediaWiki on my localhost in order to have a closer look to the code.
My first goal is to get used to the existing system before codding something.
No Comments »liblicense 0.7.0: Now with working Python bindings again
asheesh, May 16th, 2008
I just released liblicense 0.7.0 on SourceForge. It fixes the Python bindings. They’ve been broken since the 0.6 release, it seems. Some functionality in them probably worked between 0.6 and 0.7, but (read on for more)…
No Comments »Stand-up Meeting 2004-04-01
Nathan Yergler, April 3rd, 2008
The Tech Team at Creative Commons has recently replaced our weekly one-on-ones (myself with each direct report) with semi-weekly stand-up meetings for the entire team. Note that we’re not really agile “purists” — our meeting involve some discussion of priorities, etc, either for the week ahead, or as a recap of the week past.
From Tuesday’s meeting:
Version Control Changes
Nathan Yergler, April 1st, 2008
I alluded to it in my last post and wanted to provide some more details and context on the changes we’re making (have made) to our source control systems. Since I started working on CC code in late 2003 we’ve hosted our source repository in the CC Tools project at Sourceforge.net, first in CVS, later in Subversion. Sourceforge.net has been great in one major respect — to the best of my knowledge we’ve never had a data loss issue. Of course, many times using Sourceforge has also felt like something to endure rather than appreciate. It was while enduring the delayed availability of Subversion that we decided to move the ccPublisher code base to Berlios.de, which was marginally better.
Since the beginning of 2008 a few things have conspired to finally push us over the edge and decide to leave Sourceforge.net behind. On one hand we’ve been itching to work with a distributed version control system (we wound up choosing Git). While using Sourceforge didn’t rule that out, I wanted to make sure that we had a place to publish our repositories publicly, both for redundancy and transparency. Accepting this as a task just made me more amenable to also creating a place to publish a Subversion repository. The other event was a morning of outages (again) on Sourceforge’s Subversion server. I was trying to commit updates to the license deeds (just over 20,000 files updated), and the operation kept failing mid-way through. Note that this is a commit that can take up to 12 hours when successful.
Two days later we were cutting over to a new system, hosted at code.creativecommons.org. We turned off write access to the Sourceforge repository, synced it, and asked contributors for public keys, which we’re using for authentication. The new system supports both Git and Subversion, public key authentication for committers (using the pretty slick gitosis on the git side) and is fast. Really, really, really fast when compared to our Sourceforge repository.
Total estimated time for testing and deployment: 2 person-days.
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