[okfn-discuss] video metadata and open license stance

[Rufus Pollock]

Jo Walsh wrote:
> 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/

Great stuff jo. It is always interesting the different communities one 
runs into while out and about!

> [[ 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. ]]

You are spot on here. Licensing is a  key issue -- the whole point of 
bothering to put metadata on your stuff is to make it easier for others 
to discover and **reuse/redistribute** it.

> 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.  

Absolutely. I know that Adnan Hadzi who is also part of Free Culture UK 
is heavily into video work with http://deptford.tv/ -- it was with him 
that I had the original discussion about the use of CC non-commercial 
licenses which became:

http://blog.okfn.org/2006/04/24/removing-the-nc/
http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/okfn-discuss/2006-April/000047.html

Regards,

Rufus