Archive for July, 2008
Mario Pena
SafeCreative.org is looking for an US intern, somebody with a “geek-lawyer” profile, preferably with spanish language knowledge that likes intellectual property issues and writes well enough. The tasks would be to help us with our english blog (http://en.safecreative.net), writing articles; about one or two per week . Would work very close to the community and business developer of SafeCreative.
Also he or she would have to maintain and give life to a future english forum helping us also to translate some FAQs and answering questions from users.
The intern would be informed about all the key issues of our registry, our goals, etc. We have some plans for the future aiming to show us as a good tool for amateur, advanced and semi-pro users. The intern should be somebody acting like a bridge, to write, but also to help increase the USA community.
To contact us for further details, please write an email to mpena (at) safecreative.org
July 28th, 2008
Mario Pena
Several weeks ago, the html code we use in our tags at SafeCreative.org after blog and individual works registrations, aswell as the pages where registration details get explained when creative commons licenses are used (http://www.safecreative.org/work/numberofwork), is adapted to the semantic web. This code incorporates the Creative Commons, under W3C standards, ccREL tagging.
This means that humans, aswell as machines, get the same information with the same page’s xhtml code. Thanks to RDFa standards which clearly define what kind of information is beeing given in each part of the page, machines understand if what they are reading is the work’s title, author’s name, kind of license, etc.
This standard proposed by Creative Commons thanks to the work of Nathan Yergler, Ben Adida, and many others, tries to provide open and accesible tools to foster the use of open licenses in the future semantic web environment; a space in which giving relevant and segmented information to search engines is vital.
Thanks to this coding, search engines can easily locate work’s information to correctly index each data whithin the license explanation page. For instance, Google, leading search engine, will find, index and provide better results with greater ease, because will be able to deliver the correct search result by giving the relevant information the user was looking for.
Another advantage is that thanks to this standarized way to give information for both humans and machines at the same tame, other web applications might use the same code to easily interact. The information can be used and understood directly with no need for mechanical procedures to identify anything. The work’s information is allways identificable. This is specially usefull for 2.0 webs.
The use of ccREL gives a clear benefit to those users that really want to be known in the Internet. We recommend everybody to update their blog’s SafeCreative tag so they have the most updated code in it. And of course, to keep on registering works so that search engines will correctly index them.
July 27th, 2008
Mario Pena
For those early adopters who might want to try the labs zone features, this is a description of how to improve the speed to register many files at the same time by simply dropping them from the desktop to a browser’s window. If every file has as name the title of the work, no many changes will be needed to perform during the first pre-registry period.
If you happen to have any problem, don’t hesitate to tell us about them even adding comments to this very post. Here you can download the tutorial and here you can check other license informations.
July 26th, 2008
Mario Pena
With a little of undesired delay, since we’ve been quite busy during the last past weeks, we bring you now a brief article about the most relevant conclusions on the copyright registries issues we found out during the Creative Commons Technology Summit June 18th at Google.
As panelist there spoke Devon Copley from Noank Media, Robert Kaye from MusicBrainz, Joe Benso from RegisteredCommons, Rich Pearson from Attributor.com, Pierre Gerard from Jamendo.com, Aaron Swartz from Open Library and Javier Prenafeta from SafeCreative.org. The whole video can be whatched here.
During the first part of the panel everybody talked about their projects, the way they worked and their concerns for the future.
More interesting, to our point of view, are the conclusions we ended up finally reaching.
To start it was quite clear that there was a real need for online copyright registries to certify authorships of works. Those registries must be flexible regarding prices, easy to use and prepared to accept any license, from “all rights” to “some rights reserved”.
We found out that there are two kinds of registries; those specialiced like SafeCreative.org or RegisteredCommons and those that are kind of registries because of their main activity, such as Jamendo or NoankMedia that distribute contents. It’s more interesting them to complement each other rather than trying to do the whole thing each by itself. Registries are good to register and distributors are good offering contents to end users.
Any of the existing registries are complimentary and should not compete with the others. It’s quite improbable that a single registry might be able to register all the contents that get done in the Internet. It’s not even desirable the creation of new monopolies.
Maybe the most important issue of all, and the most pointed one, is that registries should be able to offer a reliable security to creators and users in case of unforseen events. To achieve this there should be emergency plans in case a specific registry should end it’s business so that it’s information regarding registered works and users won’t be lost. It’s also necessary to find the proper standarization so that every registry could use protocols to gather the information, to store and to certify open and strong enough that it will help registries to share information between them.
This said, it’s quite logic that all registries start to collaborate to standarize registration, beeing each of them independent enough to offer added value features of their own so that users can freely choose to use one, many or all the registries for their works protection.
The ideal situation is then that each work’s registration can be understood by the rest of registries thanks to the standard and also understood at a semantic level by search engines. Right now there are beeing held many meetings and initiatives to find agreements about this issues. We hope this efforts will bring good news at least in a few months from now.
July 23rd, 2008
Mario Pena
Past June 18th we participated in the Creative Commons Technology Summit at Mountain View’s GooglePlex, San Francisco. It was the first technological event about registry and ccREL semantic web standards issues. The goal was to show the ccREL capabilities and the importance of this standards for registries like SafeCreative.org and others.
Joichi Ito, CEO of Creative Commons after Lawrence Lessig, pointed some very interesting concepts we do agree with. First he talked about the need of standards in technology from an agnostic political point of view. So to say, we have to create the tools in such way that the use of them will only depend from the user, not from our own opinions or political concerns. He remembered the specific case of the TCP/IP protocol standardisation that once reached produced an unseen burst of creativity and the true development of the Internet. The ways people used the TCP/IP protocol were quite different. Some projects succeeded, others didn’t, but there was no imposition about what people had to do with the neutral technology. With the development of the various CC licenses something very similar has happened. Once a new set of free (as freedom) licenses that anybody can use appear, the specific kind of license used depends only from the user. It’s possible that CC licenses users might gradually move to more “copyleft-ed” licenses because they give the ability to spread intellectual works more easily through the Internet as opposite to the more restrictive ones. Saying that, we in SafeCreative made an agnostic neutral web from the beginning; not tied to any specific kind of license, but accepting them all so that we provide the tool to register with any license (full copyright, creative commons, GPL, Anti-DRM…), but not imposing our vision of which licenses people should use. Only time will say how things finally will develop.
After Jon Ito it was the turn of Ben Adida, technical representative of Creative Commons for W3C who spoke mainly about the ccREL (Creative Commons Rights Expression Language) based on RDFa standards and it’s meaning. In short RDFa uses XHTML standards to make web pages give the same information to the human user and to the machine. This way information increases mobility, can easily travel through other applications and gets a better indexation in search engines like Google. So, by using ccREL in those sites where license gets specified, humans and machines can understand at the same time, using the same HTML code if the work can be commercially used, or modified, who is the author, the title, etc. So this information can travel through many other applications knowing always really what is the meaning of “author” or “title” or license. And how can we know it? Just using RDFa standards and the already existing definitions in the Internet like the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. Here you can find a link to the Creative Commons’s wiki with some examples to show how this system does work. We have to add at this point that SafeCreative has the ccREL language standards already implemented in our license codes. So we have our codes ready for the data web of the future. It can be used also in blogs to have a better indexation of them. Search engines now will offer more and better information about the works registered under SafeCreative.
To end with this first part just want to mention something James Boyle , member from the Creative Commons board, said about how future web applications should be: They must be simple, easy, concise and comfortable. This will contribute knowledge to spread around the world with the obvious educational benefit for mankind.
In the next article we’ll talk about the second part of the event that was entirely about registries and the different versions, needs and possibilities of them.
July 2nd, 2008