[okfn-discuss] video metadata and open license stance

[Jo Walsh]

dear all,

I met a lot of video producers all sloshing about in an OSI-funded
collaboration network and they are trying to develop and adopt 
simple common standards for video metadata. In their current draft
"spec" license is right now an optional not a required field. 
I felt they could take this opportunity to explicitly require it. 

http://blog.okfn.org/2006/10/17/the-retransmission-of-video-data/

[[ From the point of view of an individual "client" or
"consumer" licensing clarity may not be much of a
consideration; but for the operation of an aggregator, collecting and
providing scheduled or edited collections of feeds from lots of
different media publishers, explicit openess becomes much more
crucial. At the meeting I heard expressed some resistance to
imposition of licensing stance on the grounds that one kind or another
of more or less open license is an ideological decision and
not a technological one. I'm not sure the boundaries can
be so clearly drawn. There is some resistance to enforcing
compliance in the standard by requiring a statement about
licensing - even if all that says is Public Domain. The
alternative - encouraging compliance in specifications for
standards-based publishing software - is still a kind of technological
enforcement. There are cultural reasons for participating in an open
knowledge network like the one embodied by Transmission. ]]

I got a concession that they would take the matter under advisement
and recommended they seek advisement specifically from representatives
of FreeCulture such as Tom Chance. I hope this was an appropriate
thing to do.  

cheers,


jo