Detecting CC Attribution License Violations with Flickr Images on the Web

Frank Tobia, December 12th, 2008

Oshani Seneviratne, a student at MIT, presented her work on “Detecting Creative Commons Attribution License Violations with Flickr Images on the World Wide Web,” which she completed as a summer project. She summarized her motivation, the use of CC licenses in Flickr, system design, and future directions for the project.

CC provides free copyright licenses but does not provide a means of detecting violations of the terms of these licenses. For instance, someone could use a CC-BY photo on their home page without providing attribution. Oshani’s project demonstrates a means of searching Flickr to detect violations like these. The implementation uses the Flickr API to find images and license data, and detect whether or not attribution is given on the web page where the image is re-used. One limitations is that the validator needs to know the image URI in order to search Flickr.

Future directions include extending this project to other licenses, determining the feasibility of looking for non-commercial use violations, and checking for the Share-Alike condition.

Copyright Registries 2.0

Frank Tobia, December 12th, 2008

Mario Pena of Safe Creative, Joe Benso of Registered Commons, and Mike Linksvayer of CC gave a talk on “Copyright Registries 2.0″ as a continuation of the registration conversation we had at our first tech summit in June.

Mario began with a summary of registries and how they should work: they must provide pointers to works, and they must facilitate the sharing of relevant information. He pointed to RDFa and ccREL as examples of technologies in this sphere promoting interoperability. He also mentioned the Open Standards for Copyright Registry Interop as an example of the work being done to help foster online registries interoperability and standardization.

Next, Joe discussed what he sees as necessary for registries moving forward. The big point he made was that Registered Commons feels a registry authority is a necessary condition for registries to be successfully implemented. He started with a brief history of Registered Commons and named the features they provide, including use of the CC API, timestamping of works, and physical identity verification. He finished with the need for an authority: to allocate namespaces, appoint registries based on criteria, identify entities to be certified, etc.

Building the CC Network

Frank Tobia, December 12th, 2008

Creative Commons CTO Nathan Yergler discussed the Creative Commoner network, which was developed beginning in October and is still under active development. The network allows creators to collect references to their work in one place — to act as a registry. It also serves to bring people in to the CC community, and aid interoperability and connection of existing data and works.

The CC network sports personalized profile pages, OpenID, and a simple registry, which Nathan discussed in turn. Creative Commons can build layers of trust by validating a user’s “confirmed” name from PayPal transactions, meaning that license claims are more legitimate than otherwise. But there are issues, such as name changes and incorrect or outdated information from PayPal.

OpenID is an open single sign-on standard which CC provides with a Commoner account. There are issues around this as well, such as a need to trust your provider. Nathan laid out the various ways CC is working to mitigate these issues.

But “the meat of the CC network” is in the work registry. As yet it is a simple implementation. Reciprocal claims and validation are key, where the registration learns about the validity about a work registration claim based on the presence of similar license data on that page. This shows that the user making the claim does indeed have the ability to edit the work in question.

Future developments include better identification of works and metadata, registration of feeds, the ability to follow creators in their subsequent works, and general future efforts exploring registry technology.

CC Boston Tech Summit kickoff

Frank Tobia, December 12th, 2008

CC board member Hal Abelson kicked off today’s Boston tech summit with a brief history of where CC tech has been, and where CC tech is going.

Where the licenses provide interoperability for legal code, the interoperability for technologies has taken longer to develop. RDFa, which allows for distributed embedding of metadata in web pages, has been accepted as a W3C recommendation. CC and others are developing inherently distributed technologies that are inherently extensible. Clearly interoperability is the name of the game.

Hal also touted the as-yet-unreleased book Viral Spiral: how the commoners built a digital republic of their own as a story of what we have accomplished, and what more is possible.

ionicer: Making Subversion and git extra friendly

asheesh, December 2nd, 2008

We’ve discovered that some of our websites, in particular those that rely on MySQL, are very sensitive to spikes in disk I/O load. Right now, we do run some non-interactive services on the same machines as some of our websites.

Subversion and git in particular seem to cause long-duration high disk load, which causes Nathan Kinkade to get paged when e.g. wiki.creativecommons.org takes too long to load. We have found that using ionice to set background activities to “idle” priority is very useful in avoiding sending text messages to NK.

However, ionice can only be run by root, meaning regular users can’t even request the system be more gentle. So I wrote a simple tool, “ionicer,” that is a setuid-root C tool that sets its parent process’s IO priority to idle.

You can check it out in my gitweb.

I then used dpkg-divert to replace /usr/bin/svnserve and /usr/bin/git with simple shell wrappers that call ionicer before calling the real binaries.  So the call path goes:

• user connects with svn+ssh to code.creativecommons.org
• user logs in with an SSH key and executes “svnserve.”
• svnserve is really a shell script. /bin/bash runs a script which does two things:
  1. Runs ionicer, which changes the shell to I/O priority class idle, and
  2. Executes svnserve.real with the same arguments as were passed into the wrapper.

Ta-da!

Updating Pootle, with Mozilla’s help

asheesh, November 25th, 2008

We use Pootle for handling http://translate.creativecommons.org/, the site where our international affiliates and other CC community members can help us out by translating CC content into other languages. Currently we only request translations this way for core CC infrastructure like the license choose.

For a few months, I had been working on a replacement for Pootle that better-fit our needs. Mozilla, as it happens, has similar issues, and when I recently investigated, I found that they were working on improvements to Pootle. So enough working alone; we’ll work with them! Their project to improve Pootle is called “Verbatim,” and I encourage all interested in web-based translation software to read more at that link.

Nathan Yergler and I sent an email to our international affiliates email list, and since I have a lot to do before tomorrow, I’ll let it speak for itself:

Read More…

CC Network Feature Update

Nathan Yergler, October 21st, 2008

We just pushed a new feature set to CC Network; most of these are OpenID related, and I’ll try to write more in depth about the interesting ones in the near future:

• You can now elect to “always trust” an OpenID site
• Commoner (the code behind the CC Network) now supports the Simple Registration extension to OpenID
• We have preliminary (experimental) support for Verisign’s OpenID Seatbelt extension
• We’ve added a link that to “add another” after you register a work
• You can now select a full size or “thin” network badge (similar to the license badges)
• We’ve added a link in the head of profile and work list pages that points to the RDF/XML file; we still consider RDFa the primary vehicle but this may help others ingest the data

Other things you think we should add? Let us know — create an issue or email issues@creativecommons.org.

Schema Migration with Django

Nathan Yergler, October 21st, 2008

Django is an amazing web framework; we built a lot of features in a very short period of time and Django [mostly] stayed out of our way. Last night as I was working on today’s feature upgrade for creativecommons.net I decided to tackle what lots of people see as its major weakness: schema migration. Rather, the lack of an integrated migration story.

I had seen some of the tools floating around and decided to watch the panel from Djangocon to get a better overview. For the record the represented tools are dmigrations, south and django-evolution. At some point while watching the video I think I was convinced each was the right solution; they all have features/use cases to recommend them.

Selecting the correct tool is an exercise in change management: it seems almost certain that Django will eventually adopt or create a “blessed” migration tool. And at that point, we need a way to move forward. Because of this I wound up choosing dmigrations. Sure, it doesn’t do some of the fancy stuff that south and django-evolution do (dependency tracking, model “fingerprinting”) but it does let us dump out the entire migration path as raw SQL and that’s something I can easily work with when it comes time to recreate our database on the “real’ platform.

Introducing Commoner

Nathan Yergler, October 21st, 2008

Last week we launched the Creative Commons Network as part of our annual campaign. The Network is a platform for exploring digital copyright registries and has features we think will appeal to our community. Creators can register their works and add a badge to their web pages to show more information about their identity on the license deeds (for more information see this post on the CC blog).

Like everything we do at Creative Commons, the code behind the CC Network is free. commoner is a Django-based Python application that runs the code behind creativecommons.net. While we don’t expect someone would want to run a site exactly like the CC Network, we think there are plenty of opportunities for different registries that serve different communities to flourish. The enhanced deeds aren’t dependent on anything in the CC infrastructure stack — we’re just consuming metadata published on the pages.

You can find information on Commoner in the wiki or the auto-generated docs; issues can be submitted on the CC issue tracker.

Issue Tracking at code.creativecommons.org

Nathan Yergler, September 5th, 2008

Continuing the trend started when we moved our source repository, today we’re rolling out issue tracking on code.creativecommons.org. Our goals are two fold:

1. Increase transparency regarding what we are doing and plan to do. If you find a bug or suggest an idea, we’d like to make sure it’s tracked in a publicly accessible location where everyone can follow along.
2. Tangentially, we’d like to make it easier for people to contribute to the work we’re doing. We [semi-]frequently hear people say they’d like to help, but don’t know where to start. We’ve had Developer Challenges forever but they’re not easy to find and poorly maintained. I’m personally hoping that keeping the ideas in the same system we [developers] use every day will keep them in the forefront of our minds.

With respect to the first, we’re initially tracking bugs here for three projects: the license engine, Herder (a translation tool we’ll be rolling out real soon now), and CC Learn’s Universal Education Search project. Feel free to create bugs, wishes, features for any CC project; we’ll create the Project identifiers as we go.

With respect to challenges, I’ve created a community keyword we’ll assign to projects that it’s unlikely we’ll tackle, but which might be appropriate for someone in the community who wants to contribute. Luis’ idea from earlier this week is the first. I hope we have a giant pile of ideas (and a corresponding giant pile of completed ideas) by next year’s Summer of Code.