LicenseChooser 0.96 released: Fixes Share-Alike help text

asheesh, March 16th, 2009

We just noticed that LicenseChooser.js 0.95 and earlier had the wrong help
text for “Share Alike”. Due to a copy and pasting error, if you hold your
mouse over “Require Share Alike” icon in the old demos (e.g.
http://labs.creativecommons.org/demos/jswidget/tags/0.95/example_web_app/), you will see a copy of the help text that corresponds to “Prohibit Commercial Use”.

Eek.

LicenseChooser.js 0.96, as you can see at http://labs.creativecommons.org/demos/jswidget/tags/0.96/example_web_app/, fixes this problem.

CC Technology Summit Video

Nathan Yergler, January 16th, 2009

In December we held our second CC Technology Summit at MIT in Cambridge, MA. I think the day provided a great perspective on what we’re doing at CC and how others are building a real community around it. If you weren’t able to attend, we now have audio and video available. And if you missed the first one, the video for that is available as well.

We’re currently thinking about plans for the next event; if you have feedback or suggestions, email them to techsummit@creativecommons.org.

Banshee – Now with Creative Commons support! (devel)

Greg Grossmeier, January 14th, 2009

Great news from Gabriel Burt, lead developer for the Open Source media player Banshee:

(click for larger version)

Search based on the license of a song/album with direct support of displaying CC license logos!

More details available on Gabriel’s blog post.

This feature is slated to be in Banshee 1.6 but you can play with Gabriel’s development branch which has this feature thanks to the beauty of git.

git clone http://banshee-project.org/~gburt/banshee.git

Technical notes of the feature: Gabriel wrote his own parser for extracting the license information from the files. That was needed because there is currently not a Mono port of liblicense, a library which reads and writes license metadata to a wide variety of files. But now if anyone wants to help out and do the port to Mono you have an example of how to access this information via Mono.

Lets keep this ball rolling and get license read/write support in more applications!

New validator released!

asheesh, January 6th, 2009

This past summer, Hugo Dworak worked with us (thanks to Google Summer of Code) on a new validator. This work was greatly overdue, and we are very pleased that Google could fund Hugo to work on it. Our previous validator had not been updated to reflect our new metadata standards, so we disabled it some time ago to avoid creating further confusion. The textbook on CC metadata is the “Creative Commons Rights Expression Language”, or ccREL, which specifies the use of RDFa on the web. (If this sounds like keyword soup, rest assured that the License Engine generates HTML that you can copy and paste; that HTML is fully compliant with ccREL.) We hoped Hugo’s work on a new validator would let us offer a validator to the Creative Commons community so that publishers can test their web pages to make sure they encode the information they intended.

Hugo’s work was a success; he announced in August 2008 a test version of the validator. He built on top of the work of others: the new validator uses the Pylons web framework, html5lib for HTML parsing and tokenizing, and RDFlib for working with RDF. He shared his source code under the recent free software license built for network services, AGPLv3.

So I am happy to announce that the test period is complete, and we are now running the new code at http://validator.creativecommons.org/. Our thanks go out to Hugo, and we look forward to the new validator gaining some use as well as hearing your feedback. If you want to contribute to the validator’s development or check it out for any reason, take a look at the documentation on the CC wiki.

liblicense 0.8.1: The bugfixiest release ever

asheesh, December 25th, 2008

I’m greatly pleased to announce liblicense 0.8.1. Steren and Greg found a number of major issues (Greg found a consistent crasher on amd64, and Steren found a consistent crasher in the Python bindings). These issues, among
some others, are fixed by the wondrous liblicense 0.8.1. I mentioned to Nathan Y. that liblicense is officially “no longer ghetto.”

The best way enjoy liblicense is from our Ubuntu and Debian package repository, at http://mirrors.creativecommons.org/packages/. More information on what liblicense does is available on our wiki page about liblicense. You can also get them in fresh Fedora 11 packages. And the source tarball is available for download from sourceforge.net.

P.S. MERRY CHRISTMAS!

The full ChangeLog snippet goes like this:

liblicense 0.8.1 (2008-12-24):
* Cleanups in the test suite: test_predicate_rw’s path joiner finally works
* Tarball now includes data_empty.png
* Dynamic tests and static tests treat $HOME the same way
* Fix a major issue with requesting localized informational strings, namely that the first match would be returned rather than all matches (e.g., only the first license of a number of matching licenses). This fixes the Python bindings, which use localized strings.
* Add a cooked PDF example that actually works with exempi; explain why that is not a general solution (not all PDFs have XMP packets, and the XMP packet cannot be resized by libexempi)
* Add a test for writing license information to the XMP in a PNG
* Fix a typo in exempi.c
* Add basic support for storing LL_CREATOR in exempi.c
* In the case that the system locale is unset (therefore, is of value “C”), assume English
* Fix a bug with the TagLib module: some lists were not NULL-terminated
* Use calloc() instead of malloc()+memset() in read_license.c; this improves efficiency and closes a crasher on amd64
* Improve chooser_test.c so that it is not strict as to the *order* the results come back so long as they are the right licenses.
* To help diagnose possible xdg_mime errors, if we detect the hopeless application/octet-stream MIME type, fprintf a warning to stderr.
* Test that searching for unknown file types returns a NULL result rather than a segfault.

Closing: What’s next in 2009

Frank Tobia, December 12th, 2008

Nathan Yergler proceeded to wrap up the tech conference with some humble predictions about where CC tech will be headed.

The following are a brief list of these future initiatives:

• Using RDFa to publish metadata in a distributed fashion
• The Next Generation of MozCC
• Making attribution easier
• Universal Education Search
• CC0 & Public Domain Assertion
• OSCRI / CC Network and creating an interoperable registry with Safe Creative and Registered Commons

Preview of FairShare and Findings on NC License Distribution

Frank Tobia, December 12th, 2008

Rich Pearson began with an introduction to FairShare, which is a soon-to-be-launched free tool that allows creators to claim their works and discover how their works are shared and remixed. FairShare is open and supports multiple licensing standards. He then stepped through a demo of FairShare.

The second part of his talk was a brief overview of some CC licensing statistics from the web. They found at least 56 million licenses uses (excluding a deep search of images and Flickr).  Another interesting point was the long tail of jurisdiction-specific licenses: nearly 75% of licenses were generic (unported), with all other jurisdictions having a no more than a few percent each.

Open Source Knowledge Management: What Comes After Access?

Frank Tobia, December 12th, 2008

Jonathan Rees of Science Commons discussed the open source knowledge management system that Science Commons is developing. He discussed the importance of interfacing different stores of data and knowledge, and elucidated how Science Commons is making progress on these issues. In the process Jonathan gave six layers of what comprises an interface: permission, access, container, syntax, vocabulary, and semantics.

The focus of this project is on data integration, and the importance of data integration is reducing the huge transactions costs of using different data stores which have been assembled for different purposes. Data integration does happen, but at huge expense of effort; it is hard, complex, and fragile;”glue” is necessary at all levels, and the process is manual and error-prone.

By developing and testing the whole interface stack for scientific data, the data integration problem becomes vastly easier to understand, browse, search, consult, transform, analyze, visualize, model, annotate, and organize data.

Jonathan closed with a call to action is to “choose, promote, and nourish sharing solutions at every level in the stack”.

Life After REC: The Future of RDFa

Frank Tobia, December 12th, 2008

Ben Adida is back again from the first tech conference with a new talk about RDFa.

First he gave a brief review of RDFa: there exists a huge chasm between the human web and the data web. RDFa addresses our need to bridge this gap. We want machine-readable metadata so we can use computer programs to answer simple questions about a work to save on time and effort. He then moved on to explaining ccREL, the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language. There are four principles for publishing in HTML: 1) visual correspondence, 2) don’t repeat yourself, 3) remix friendliness, 4) extensibility and modularity.

For the main portion of his talk, Ben went over the events of the past six months regarding RDFa adoption.

• April-May: Digg deployed RDFa.
• June: RDFa goes W3C “Candidate Recommendation” with around 12 implementations (parsers).
• June: Open Archives Initiatives supports RDFa; UK National Archive uses RDFa.
• September: Yahoo SearchMonkey deploys RDFa support.
• October: RDFa goes W3C Recommendation.
• November: CC launches the CC network in November; Drupal announces roadmap for RDFa integration.

He concluded with a demonstration of sample SearchMonkey functionality that grabs CC license metadata from search results and displays that information on the search page.

What’s next?, asks Ben, with a strong disclaimer that this is just a small glimpse of what is possible. He points to HTML 4 and 5 integration, the simplification of common cases (not having to keep redefining common namespaces), finding common ground with the microformat community, and better search and in-browser tools.

The question Ben asks you to take away is this: What are you waiting for to consume and/or publish RDFa?

Government Information Licensing Framework

Frank Tobia, December 12th, 2008

David Torpie of the Office of Economic and Statistical Research at the Queensland Treasury gave a talk on “Government Information Licensing Framework: a multidisciplinary project improving access to Public Sector Information.” This is a project to give greater access to Australian government data, to make government more transparent, and in doing so to develop a standard set of terms and conditions that are broadly applicable to other government contexts.

David first answered the question of why the Australian government even needs to worry about licensing its works. In Australia, unlike the United States, the government has copyright over works produced by government agencies. Australian copyright law also extends to less-than-creative works (such as telephone directories), which increases the importance that public licensing is clear and simple.

The solution developed at the Queensland Treasury is “digital license management”, or DLM. DLM is a technology to embed license metadata into documents and other works, developed in Java. Benefits include ease of linking from data to license, and finding information based on its license. DLM was developed before a suitable alternative was available; liblicense now provides a similar functionality in C. The team developing DLM is working with CC’s tech team for collaboration, and initial indications are that a dedicated Java tool may prove very useful.