Python && cumulative metrics?

Ankit Guglani, June 23rd, 2008

So I get to see the state-of-the-art and reconciling Apache and Squid logs. Based on this I need to come up with a way to reformulate the referrer ID and other such data for the logs at i.creativecommons and the ones from Varnish. As speculated in my messy proposal, a .sh using egrep is employed. Still bulk of the work is done in Python. So this doesn’t give me an excuse to read up on the Advanced Bash Shell Scripting Guide, but instead something on Python. Fun as well.

As far as I can tell, these scripts will be run before the logs are archived and uploaded in S3 storage. This will work great for the new logs which are generated from that day onwards from when the scripts are implemented. What about the analysis requiring cumulative data or trend analysis? I’ll need to sort this one out, a lot of the analysis depends on access to all the data.

Will be working from a fellow GSoCers place today, hoping to cover up on some lost ground because of travels and intermittent internet access. Will be back in Singapore and firing on all cylinders on the 8th.

Creative Commons Looks Out At Copyright 2.0

Tim Hwang, June 18th, 2008

At the final plenary session of the Creative Commons Technology Summit, Ben Adida fielded three overarching questions to the audience:

1) What do we need out of Copyright 2.0/Registry 2.0?

2) What collaborative technology efforts are necessary?

3) What role will CC play/not play?

Moving from this initial impetus, three major responses, ideas, and debates emerged.

First, the issue of liability for declaring seemed to be a persistent concern on the ability of CC content to be adopted into the commercial sphere. Various solutions were suggested, and discussion centered on the need for efforts to be placed into educating about Creative Commons, broadening a more exclusive focus on systems design.

Second, one desire voiced by many of the registry projects was the need for standards to link their metadata with other registries. While Adida suggested the possibility of a Federation of Registries to establish this, other discussions ensued as to the extent to which Google and the web more broadly already served such a purpose.

Finally, a palpable challenge to the success of Creative Commons, brought by Lucas Gonze and others, seems to exist in the extent to which “noncommercial” remains ambiguous. While some argued for augmented licenses with other qualifications and better fleshed out terms, Mike Linksvayer pointed out that this was a small issue and only an invitation for individuals to “stop whining.” He argued that those concerned about the issue could seek out content without these restrictions.

(Photo courtesy Joi Ito)

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

————-

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.

———

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.

———

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.

———

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.

———

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.

———

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.

———

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.

(all photos CC-BY Joi Ito)

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)

Digital Asset Management, Now!

Frank Tobia, June 18th, 2008

The next panel, and a damn fine one, is on “digital asset management on the web and the desktop” with Gunar Penikis from Adobe, Stephen Lau of Songbird, and Lucas Gonze.

Gunar described Adobe’s <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Metadata_Platform”>XMP</a>, which is a standardized platform for processing and storing standardized metadata. The SDK is freely available under a BSD license, and CC metadata is integrated. Check it out at <a href=”http://www.adobe.com/xmp”>www.adobe.com/xmp</a>.

Steven discussed <a href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songbird_(software)”>Songbird</a>, a cross-platform media player built upon Mozilla. He touched upon the issues arising with managing music metadata, which is traditionally of poor quality, and discussing the issues Songbird has run into when trying to display music data and make it useful. They want to integrate CC licenses in every respect, pulling metadata from webpages and even adding it to the file if it’s not there.

Lucas (presentation available <a href=”http://gonze.com/webofsongs/”>here</a>) spoke on the topic of making music a first-class region of the web. He posits that music today is “fundamentally unwebby,” and to solve this he proposes a single good URL for every song, “good” being defined here as “comprehensive, unique, stable”. This adapts the principles of good web architecture to the music domain.

More ccREL, licensing Science, and liblicense to the rescue

Greg Grossmeier, June 18th, 2008

(Joi Ito, CC:BY)

Nathan Yergler and Asheesh Laroia

The panelists discussed current technologies being worked upon by Creative Commons and Science Commons.

Nathan started out with a presentation of ccREL examples including integration with Magnatune content and an easy to use ccREL generator for content producers.  This generator will allow people to input data about what license they are using, how they want it attributed, using what name and what link, and any other CC+ information they want.

John Wilbanks

John presented on the larger initiatives of ScienceCommons including trying to inform users on how to license certain work to enable the greatest use.  For example, when providing access to scientific databases they recommond a CC0 license with Social Norms attached.  This will enable use of this data for a variety of projects and possibly help to rectify the fact that we are able to share and use more information on what hotel we are staying at than scientific reasearch that could help change the world.

Asheesh, with the help of past Creative Commons interns and others, developed a software license which allows software engineers to add “license support” to their applications, liblicense.  This will allow a music player to be able to know what license an mp3/ogg/aac file under.  Along with just being able to see what license a file is using the library will allow content creators to embed their choice of license information into files at the time of creation.

(Joi Ito, CC:BY)

ccREL Joining Man and Machine, Presenting Cute Dogs

Tim Hwang, June 18th, 2008

Ben Adida, Creative Commons W3C Representative, gave a presentation on the first session of the Technology Summit on ccREL, a syntax-free machine-readable code for licenses.

The problem, as Adida explained between images of code and pets, was that the traditional breakdown divides CC licensing deeds into machine and human readable versions.

Moreover, information about licenses is stored in HTML which is opaque to humans and parsers alike and easy to make errors in. ccREL provides a simple framework built across RDFa for license information to be easily shared, built on, and extended to a variety of different uses in a form understandable by the browser.

Ultimately, the ambition of ccREL is to provide ways to link the vast stores of varied data on the web. One outcome, visual correspondence, would empower the user to gain contextual information with the ease of point-and-click, would be possible with ccREL and RDFa more generally.

(photo courtesy Joi Ito CC BY)

Joi Ito Intro

Frank Tobia, June 18th, 2008

CC’s CEO Joi Ito kicked off the festivities with an admittedly-stretched but wholly acceptable metahpor: comparing the internet’s early battle to promote TCP/IP adoption with our present battles to promote CC’s adoption. Joi sees CC as a means of creating a path from a completely closed to a completely open world.

There are two pieces of the framework: the legal and technical piece, and the political piece. This distinction is paramount. Says Joi, “We can’t exclude people on the technology level. …  We want Republicans using it.. we want everyone using it.”

<a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/”>Photo by Steren Giannini, licensed CC-BY-3.0</a>

CC Tech Summit pre-blogging

Mike Linksvayer, June 18th, 2008

CC’s awesome interns (and perhaps others) will be live blogging the tech summit tomorrow, but panelist (and long time CC friend and innovator) Rob Kaye has a pre-blog — Thoughts on Copyright Registries.

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….