[Flora-help] re: Creative Commons requirement on flora.org sites

[Marian]

Hi Russell,

I wondered if you could help me understand more clearly what your thinking
is that is behind the CC license requirement for the flora.org sites.

b) Are all the pages intended by their creators to be copied
royalty-free for non-commercial usage (can't make a book out of it without
additional permission) verbatim (no changes being done without additional
permission) on the Internet? This should be understood as the minimum on
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License Canada

I don't quite follow why you believe this should be the minimum on the web.
I make a distinction between the technical copying of a webpage for it to be
displayable on individual computer screens under the original URL or indexed
by search engines, and the copying that is a re-using of a piece of writing
on a different site than where the author originally placed it. Obviously,
the copyright law needs to take into account the technical necessities of
the web, but the second kind of copying is what the non-technical think of
when they think of authors' copyright, and that's what I'm talking about
when I use the word "copying" here.

It makes sense to me that informational text should be freely copyable.
Articles that include original thought, though, have a different kind of
intellectual value. I think there are instances in which an author may
prefer to keep their writing on the site of origin and not want an article
of theirs incorporated into a website with which they may not want to be
associated. As I understand it, the Creative Commons license allows people
to copy entire articles to their own site, so authors using a Creative
Commons license wouldn't be able to make that reservation. Are you saying
that this is how it should be on the web? That if an author doesn't want
their article published on an objectionable site they shouldn't put it on
their own site to begin with?

There's also the question of web traffic. Even when it's verbatim,
attributed and for non-commercial purposes, the person would still be
copying something of intellectual value from the site of origin and
incorporating that value into a new site without having to inform the
author. Since the content of a site is what brings visitors to that site, it
seems to me that it could, in effect, divert readers of a particular author
away from the author's site if users can find the same content just as
easily somewhere else first. Even when money isn't involved, intellectual
value and web traffic still are, so I think some authors will prefer to have
a quote with a link that directs users to the site of origin rather than
licensing in this way.

Just trying to understand whether your perspective is different from my own
or whether I haven't interpreted it correctly.

:-)
Marian

[Russell McOrmond]

Post by Marian
Hi Russell,

Seasons Greetings..

Post by Marian
I wondered if you could help me understand more clearly what your
thinking is that is behind the CC license requirement for the flora.org
sites.

...

Post by Marian
I don't quite follow why you believe this should be the minimum on the web.

I'm not suggesting that it "should be" the minimum, but that if you try
to devise a minimum license agreement minimum that is compatible with the
features that already exist on the public "no membership required"
Internet that you would come to a license that looks like the most
conservative CC license.

The most important thing to start with is an understanding that there
are different parts of the Internet. There is a public "no membership
required" part where readers are anonymous and there is no way to tell one
from the other or charge them money, and no way to license one category of
reader/copyer/republisher differently than any other. No matter what your
licensing terms are, they are all or nothing with no possibility of
differentiation.

Then there is the more private "membership required" where readers are
known and licenses can be specific to individual persons or organizations.
FLORA.org doesn't offer "membership required" features, so the licensing
options in this part of the network don't concern us for the moment.

In other articles I explained why I believed that the
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License is the default license for the
public "no membership required" Internet.

To avoid doubt, I am saying that if the author intended to reserve more
rights they should not be publishing on the "no membership require" part
of the net, and should instead be publishing on a "membership required"
part or not publishing on the Internet at all.

Excess Copyright? Towards a full spectrum of business models for published
works
http://www.flora.ca/russell/drafts/excess-copyright.html

None of this suggests that a copyright holder can't publish their "all
rights reserved" documents on the Internet, but that if they do so it must
be on a "membership required" part in order for their "all rights
reserved" license to have any meaning at all.

Adding in a "membership required" isn't about charging money. Many
online newspapers offer free registration so that they can track you, but
also to ensure that their pages are never cached or redistributed by any
other site. This is their way of clearly indicating that they wish to
distribute their works in a license that has "more rights reserved" than
the implied one from the public "no membership required" Internet.


What is the implied license?
----------------------------

Lets try looking at this question from the other direction by trying to
come up with a license agreement which reflects what the agreement would
need to be to mirror the current operations of the public "no membership
required" part of the Internet.

Q: Are modified versions or derivative works allowed?

While some people may want to allow changed versions to be distributed,
this clearly cannot be assumed so we must assume that no derivatives are
authorized.

Q: Is it intended that people be allowed to take your name off the page or
hide where it came from?

This cannot be assumed, so attribution is expected.

This issue came up in the past where archives of Rosaleen Dickson's "Ask
Great Granny" http://www.flora.org/granny/ pages were copied onto
http://www.ask-great-granny.com/ without any attribution at all. There
were no reference to Rosaleens homepage, the /granny/ page or even to
Rosaleen's name. Everyone involved considered this a clear violation of
Rosaleens rights so we approached them. They fixed things up by putting
in appropriate attribution.


Q: Is there an expectation of payment being sent to the author?

Obviously this is NO for the "no membership required" part of the
Internet, so royalty-free can be assumed. Since every browser is
anonymous there wouldn't be a method to receive payment even if some
rights holder mistakenly believed payment was due.

Q: Can someone else making money off of our work, such as printing it in a
book?

As with the other questions there may be some people who want
this, but this is not the general rule so no commercial uses allowed must
be assumed.

Q: Is any copying pre-authorized?

Obviously this is yes as any electronic communication involves copying,
but now we have to specify what copying is pre-authorized.

Q: Are we allowed to view on a browser?

Obviously intended, so this means all the copying onto the various
caches to make this work must have been authorized.

There are possibly caches on the server-side, on the IAP (Internet
Access Provider), and also on the users own computer. One of the most
popular public web-page caching software is SQUID, which supports a
protocol called IRCache which facilitates a peer-to-peer network
distribution system for caches. This means that when your local ISP asks
for a page it will try to receive the page from the closest/fastest cache
in the IRCache Mesh rather than trying to copy from the remote webserver.

http://www.ircache.net/

Obviously this should be understood as authorized.

Q: What about sites that republish pages?

There are many sites which not only cache pages, but offer them for
direct public view. The Google search engine is an example which allows
you to directly view their cache of pages:

http://www.google.ca/search?q=cache:www.flora.org/homeschool-ca/faq.html++Canadian+Homeschool+Resource

Growing in importance and popularity is the Wayback engine, which
currently has 25 different versions from different dates of the same
Homeschool-CA FAQ page.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.flora.org/homeschool-ca/faq.html

Obviously this should be understood as authorized.


The law can't be subjective about what is pre-authorized. You can't
realistically say you authorize your favorite search engines and archival
sites to republish your pages, but not some other sites which you don't
personally approve of. The law can't facilitate grey areas or that type
of subjectivity, so either you want everyone to ask permission (all rights
reserved), or you want to pre-authorize certain activities equally for
everyone (some rights reserved). If you want to authorize some people but
not others, you need to have some way to know who-is-who which is a
facility only offered on the "membership required" part of the Internet.

So what do we have:

- Pre-authorized for everyone equally
- Attribution required
- No Commercial uses
- No Derivative works or changes.
- Royalty-free distribution.


Translated into a license agreement this would be the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License , with the Canadian version
documented in the following commons-deed:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/ca/


If you think that a more "all rights reserved" license is compatable
with the public "no membership required" Internet then let me know what
you think it is. We can then run scenarios though that license and see if
it is reasonable and workable under the law.

The main issue here is that that the law is pretty black-and-white:
either you equally give everyone the same authorization, or you must
individually authorize people. In order to individually authorize some
people but not others you need to know who is who, a feature that is
simply not facilitated on the public "no membership required" Internet.


Note: I realize some in this forum have heard this all already, but this
is important. We need the members of this community to go to their own
communities and educate people on this issue. There is a need for people
to spend the time to think through all these issues before the government
steps in and imposes some bad decisions on us (Such as the levy proposed
by the Canadian government on all these pages on the public "no membership
required" internet that we should understand to be authorized for royalty
free distribution)

Summary of Interim Report on Copyright Reform
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/view/550