[okfn-discuss] video metadata and open license stance

Wed Oct 18 11:58:11 UTC 2006

Benj. Mako Hill wrote:
> <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).

This is very good point. In this case I think we should separate:

a) having a license field
b) having a license field which defaults to something other than full 
'all rights reserved' copyright

I support (a) since I think that licensing is a very important issue and 
one which is often insufficiently considered. However I don't think I 
would support (b) for exactly the reason you mention which is that some 
people might get upset if they didn't realise they were granting more 
permissions than they had intended.

Of course I would like people to be encouraged to consider more 
'liberal' licensing options and having the license field in there might 
encourage people to think about more than they would otherwise (or 
perhaps more likely that the tools that get developed to work with the 
standard 'think' about the license field).

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

Yes they do which is why they are so powerful.

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

That's an interesting point however I'm not so sure that this is really 
the case. Let us say the license field defaults to full copyright. Why 
is this any different from where nothing was said and you get full 
copyright by implicit default. In terms of social attitudes (e.g. you 
people might say: 'well they've got full copyright but they don't mean 
to assert it') I think you are in the same boat.

Of course it is true that the more people who **do not** use full 
copyright -- for example by using a CC or free software license -- the 
more the use of full copyright is interpreted as consciously chosen and 
therefore socially as well as legally binding.

Regards,

Rufus