[okfn-discuss] Annotating Open Images with licence and authorship to prevent copyfraud

Thu Aug 22 17:13:55 UTC 2013

Oh, and I forgot one of the most important parts!

Over on the OKFN Labs (and Creative Commons' development list) we've
been talking about an Infrastructure4Open mini-summit in London later
this year to discuss matters such as this further. You can find the
current thinking on: http://okfnpad.org/ctechsummit  The 11th or 17th
of December look like the most promising dates for this right now.

Jonas

On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 7:08 PM, Jonas Öberg
<jonas at shuttleworthfoundation.org> wrote:
> Hi Peter, and everyone who's chimed in to this discussion so far. I'm
> a newcomer to this list, so allow me to introduce myself too in my
> response.
>
> Since March this year, I'm a Fellow of the Shuttleworth Foundation
> where I work with metadata for attribution and licensing information,
> and all the promises and problems related with it. So I'm very
> interested in this thread!
>
>> If the images were indelibly stamped with licences and authorship
>> copyfraud would be very much harder. I suspect this would also be welcomed
>> by authors themsleves as it promotes their authorship.
>
> Full agreement on this point from Peter, and I'm happy to see others
> have implemented or thought similarly. Now, stamping or watermarking
> has its own problems: it gets distorted when scaling, for instance.
> This doesn't mean that it shouldn't be used when possible, but that
> there are also other mechanisms that could be employed, and embedding
> metadata in the works is one such method.
>
> Peter mentioned separately in the thread that metadata is very easily
> stripped from a work. This is very true. The International Press and
> Telecommunications Council of which we're a member have studied this
> in social media and found out that metadata *in most cases* gets
> stripped when distributing a work. There's been some changes recently
> from Flickr to retain the metadata but otherwise, it's not very
> dependable.
>
> So for a short-term solution, it's not viable. But it's useful in
> closed environments where you have an idea of the toolchain involved
> and can implement relevant support it in. It might also be viable in
> the long term, and the people I'm speaking to from the industry is
> certainly pushing in the direction of increased retention of metadata.
> The UK based Copyright Licensing Steering Group (CLSG) released a
> draft voluntary Code of Practice for creating and retaining Metadata
> in images just before the summer:
> http://www.clsg.info/codeofpractice.html
>
> The work that I do at the Shuttleworth Foundation is in Commons
> Machinery, an initiative to delve deeper into the metadata field, to
> push for (reasonable) retention of metadata, building prototypes to
> show how this could work, and contributing to the standardisation
> efforts in this area. You're welcome to look at our work on
> http://commonsmachinery.se (we have an awesome introductory video
> there too).
>
> You can also watch a presentation that I gave at the RMLL earlier this
> year which outlines our current work and thinking.
> http://video.rmll.info/videos/embedded-metadata-for-licenses/
>
> Oh, and I should also mention that we're looking to hire another
> developer to join our team :-)
> http://commonsmachinery.se/get-involved/job-openings/
>
>
> Sincerely,
> Jonas