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Questions about use of Creative Commons licensing
Shelley Powers asks some great questions about Creative Commons licensing:
By provided RDF/XML to desribe the license, the Creative Commons opened the door to including license information in any document formatted with markup, regardless of the appropriateness of the action, and our understanding of such actions. Such as in RSS feeds. Like this web page. Even extending to software, as Jon Udell demonstrated with his LibraryLookup functionality. Looking closer at Jon's use of the CCL, a question arises as to what exactly Jon is covering in the license: is it the LibraryLookup function? Or the contents of the web page where the license is embedded? This can't be understood just by the fact that the license is embedded in the same HTML page as the desciption of LibraryLookup. [Shelley Powers]
My intent, expressed in the description embedded in the RDF, was to cover a "Method for using a JavaScript bookmarklet to extract the ISBN from an ISBN-bearing URL and use it to look up the book elsewhere, particularly in a local library." Not the software per se (of which there is hardly any), but the idea. And for the reason I stated: because business-method patents have been granted for even sillier things, and I saw this as a way to discourage that.
Although Sam Ruby approves, Shelley (via Matt Croydon) points to this entry on Larry Lessig's blog:
Matt Croydon wonders about how CC licenses will interact with software. The answer is that they won't. We share RMS's concern that there is a proliferation of licenses in software. Our view was that there was a dearth for other creative content. Thus we start outside the software world. For now, at least. [Lawrence Lessig]
I've asked, in the comments section there, for an opinion as to whether LibraryLookup should in fact not use the cc license.
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