[okfn-discuss] video metadata and open license stance

[Benj. Mako Hill]

<quote who="Jo Walsh" date="Tue, Oct 17, 2006 at 12:01:07PM -0700">
> 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/

Maybe I'm not getting this completely but I'm not quite as wild about
requiring that people be explicit about licensing in *all* works.

Even if you control the software used to produce content that you care
about, you can't give a lesson is copyrights and copywrongs to
everybody who uses that software. More problematically, you can't
legally set the default to anything that would give away exclusive
rights for people unless they know and understand exactly what they're
doing in the process. If you're going to be explicit, the default
needs to be the status quo -- all rights reserved or *explicitly*
unlicensed (effectively the same).

As we know, defaults have a way of sticking around.

If the default ends up explicitly forbidding things that were
otherwise left unsaid, some might argue that you could even be worse
off.

Regards,
Mako

-- 
Benjamin Mako Hill
mako at atdot.cc
http://mako.cc/

Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so
far as society is free to use the results. --RMS
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