Aggregation and Dissemination ofCollective Cultural Works

PNC 2010 Annual ConferenceDecember 1-3, 2010

Tyng-Ruey Chuang （莊庭瑞）Institute of Information Science, and

Research Center for Information Technology InnovationAcademia Sinica

Outline

• Public Licensing• Content Hosting Services• Collective Cultural Works• Are Public Licenses Alone Sufficient?

Public Licensing• Rights to use a work are granted to the public in

advance with a written agreement– the public are free to make copies, for example

• The agreement (license) is worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive, and irrevocable

• Some pre-conditions may apply– such as attribution, not commercial usage, or allowing only

verbatim copy

• Public licenses are not necessarily “open”– licenses may restrict reuse and redistribution

Popular Public Licenses

• GNU General Public License• GNU Free Documentation License• BSD License

• Creative Commons (CC) Licenses– CC Attribution (CC BY)– CC Attribution — ShareAlike (CC BY-SA)

Creative Commons Licenses

Content Hosting Services• Services that maintain contents for their users

– Sources of user-generated contents– Communities of content generators

• Hosted contents can be CC-licensed– Licensing information as searchable metadata– E.g., Flickr, Soundcloud, Vimeo, Slideshare, etc.

• Popular services are shaping user practices– Regulations on content circulation; norms of

content production, consumption, and sharing– Many service providers are for-profit entities

flickrCC (flickrcc.bluemountains.net)

Terms of Service (ToS)• ToS are the rules to which the users must

agree in order to use the service– quality of service– acceptable user behavior– copyright issues– personal data– (no) warranty

• Service providers can change ToS anytimeand without notice to the users

• ToS may compete with pubic licenses

Where are my originals?

What do I get with a Pro account?• Unlimited storage• Unlimited bandwidth• Archiving of high-resolution original

images• Ad-free browsing and sharing

Compare that to what you get with a FreeAccount:

• Only smaller (resized) images accessible(though the originals are saved in caseyou upgrade later)

Flickr FAQ:

Must you register and login to that sitejust to download my CC-licensed works?

Uploading others’ CC-licensed works? ↑bobchao’s original (CC BY-SA)↓trc’s derivative (CC BY-SA)

Yahoo! ToS:… However, with respect to Content yousubmit or make available for inclusionon publicly accessible areas of theYahoo! Services, you grant Yahoo! thefollowing worldwide, royalty-free andnon-exclusive license(s), asapplicable: …

CC BY-SA:… You may not offer or impose any termson the Work that restrict the terms ofthis License or the ability of therecipient of the Work to exercise therights granted to that recipient underthe terms of the License. You may notsublicense the Work. …

CC-licensed? Nobody knows anymore!

• Flickr brokers an exclusive Getty Images agencydeal for you, even for your CC-licensed photos.

• Getty Images' FAQ, "... if we do select an imagethat is available under a Creative Commonslicense, it will automatically be changed to AllRights Reserved on Flickr and from then on youmust observe the exclusivity obligations ...”.

• Flickr's FAQ, "... if you proceed with yoursubmission, switching your license to All RightsReserved (on Flickr) will happen automatically”.

What is in that ToS for me?• In a ToS, the service provider sets conditions to which I

must agree before I can start to upload/downloadcontents.

• With public licenses (such as the CC licenses), I grantto others some rights to use my contents. And viceversa when I use others’ publicly licensed works.

• Service providers may not care what we intend toachieve with the public licenses (even if they offer tomark our contents CC-licensed).

• ToS is the only agreement between me and my serviceprovider, and it dictates how my contents are served.

Collective Cultural Works• Types of collectiveness

– Collections of Individual Works (Flickr)– Collaborative Works (Wikipedia)

• Kinds of usage– Access (to experience; Youtube)– Copy (to download; Scribd)– Remix (to download, mix, and upload; ccMixter)

• Ways of aggregation and dissemination– Hosted (large-sized; constant updating; communal

sharing or “walled garden”?)– Free Floating (small-sized; personal use; need

housekeeping)

Collaborative Works

• Collaborative Works– works created and used by multiple members– member composition is fluid and indefinite– materials contributed by collaborators and/or taken

from other sources– the outcome is of high social and/or economic

value

• Who own the rights to the outcome of acollaboration?

Collaborative Works + Public Licenses

• Who can use the outcome? How tostart a collaboration?

• All participants agree to a particularpublic license for the outcome oftheir collaboration– whoever agrees to the license can participate– the right to make modifications, and the

obligation to share the modifications likewise

Copyright your tweets?Check out 1.status.net by Jon Phillips!

Public Licensing Revisited• “What are public licenses for?” (Shunling Chen)

– expressing individual good-faiths– maintaining collective boundaries

• Individual good-faiths can be divided andcompromised (e.g, by service providers’ ToS)

• Collective boundaries should be deliberated andenforced (e.g., the Debian Social Contract)

• Are public licenses alone sufficient to achieve acultural commons?– “My photos in Facebook are CC-licensed.” What does this

mean?