Jason Pearce

In one corner we have Stanford Law School professor Lawrence Lessig speaking to LinuxWorld attendees about the Creative Commons license, and in the other we have a political party in Sweden called the Pirate Party establish a commercial darknet that lets anybody send and receive files (including copyrighted material) anonymously without being tracked or traced.

Creative Commons

I’ve met some of the folks over at Creative Commons and fully support their effort to create a new type of copyright law that allows content creators to share their original work with others and for others to legally use our build upon those works with a Creative Commons license.

I like the idea so much that all of the content on this site as well as nearly 8,100 of my photos has a Creative Commons license.

In summary, Creative Commons is good.

Darknet Relakks

Earlier this year (January 2006), The Pirate Party (Swedish: Piratpartiet) became a new political party in Sweden. The party strives to reform laws regarding intellectual property, including copyright, patent and the protection of design. The party also wants to strengthen the right to privacy.

On Tuesday, the Pirate Party created Relakks, a Swedish broadband subscription service that has the potential to become a large scale commercial darknet.

Typically, a Darknet is a private virtual network where users only connect to people they trust, usually containing fewer than 10 users each. Darknets are file sharing networks where users can share files with each other — sometimes copyrighted files such as mp3s and movies.

The folks over at Relakks think they have developed a secure and legal way for users to communicate with other users anonymously. They do this by giving you a new IP address over a 128-bit encrypted VPN connection between your computer and Internet.

Using Relakks would prevent your existing ISP from intercepting or tracking the applications you use to access the internet or the communication/traffic they create. In short, your ISP wouldn’t know if you were simply checking your email or file swapping Metallica’s songs via Kazaa.

In summary, it just got easier to switch over to the dark side of copyright law.

Phishing is a type of deception designed to steal your identity by convincing you to provide it under false pretenses. Phishing schemes appear to come from popular websites you trust. In this case, the message came from Symantec.

From: Symantec Corporation [mailto:symantecd@ecmailing.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 01, 2006 5:06 PM
To: Pearce, Jason
Subject: Technology Seminar in Indianapolis on March 15 - Register Today

The body of the email was promoting an upcoming conference. It included a Register Now link, which took you to a veritas.com URL (a subsidiary of Symantec) but a Symantec logo and design. The site collected personal information and was not secure.

Additional indicators that the email might be a phishing attempt include:

1. Images resided on veritas.com
2. Most links went to veritas.com
3. The body of the email said to contact webmaster@symantec.com for questions
4. The email was from “Symantec Corporation symantecd@ecmailing.com”
5. www.ecmailing.com does not bring up a website
6. www.ecmailing.com is registered to a company called Creative Automation
7. Creative Automation’s email and domain servers don’t even use or reference ecmailing.com

Though I was aware Veritas and Symantec are the same companies, I suspect some might not be aware. But I don’t know who Creative Automation or ecmailing.com are, and don’t trust them. Frankly, there were too many indicators that this was a phishing attempt, I had to ask.

So I sent an email to webmaster@symantec.com asking if the email was legit or not. In two hours they replied and said it was. But when I asked them how I was to know that an email from Symantec or Veritas is a valid email when it doesn’t come from either @symatec.com or @veritas.com domains, they’ve offered no reply.

You’d think that a company that launched it’s Symantec Internet Threat Meter wouldn’t send an email that resembles many phishing characteristics on the very same day. Perhaps Symantec should read its own Online Fraud: Phishing advice.

What does the Creative Commons “NonCommercial” license mean? It seems I’m not the only one confused.

Pictured here is the ceiling of a Washington, DC subway/metro station. I took this photo last year while traveling on business. The photo resides within Flickr and is enjoying an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence.

This week, many Flickr photographers received an email from Schmap, a start-up that will soon offer destination guides. Schmap’s email stated my photo was short-listed for inclusion in an upcoming guide, and gave me an option to submit or withdraw my photo from their final selection phase.

So they were nice enough to ask. They didn’t have to ask, since my photo has a Creative Commons license — or did they?

The question at hand is, “Is Schmap considered commercial or noncommercial?” Well, they don’t even know.

Their website said, “The creative commons license that you’ve assigned your photo(s) provides for non-commerical use. While all of our Schmap destination guides will be FREE to download, some photographers might nevertheless consider these to be commercial (advertising revenue will support free distribution to our readers).” And then some Terms of Submission followed.

Since they didn’t know, Schmap decided to play it safe by treating my image more like it was protected by copyright and that I was agreeing to a new terms of use by granting them certain permissions.

Three out of Creative Commons’ six licenses restrict the licensed content from commerical use, which reads “Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.”

Creative Commons fails to better define what Commercial means. Does it mean people pay for a content or service directly? What if the content or service is subsidized through advertising? And how about nonprofits, are they commerical entities or not?

I don’t know these answers and perhaps neither does Schmap, which is why they asked.

I love Flickr and the Creative Commons license. But lately, there seems to be some confusion about various aspects of the CC license. Perhaps the confusion is on my part, so I’ll let you be the judge.

About: Creative Commons

According to Wikipedia: The Creative Commons website enables copyright holders to grant some of their rights to the public while retaining others through a variety of licensing and contract schemes including dedication to the public domain or open content licensing terms. The intention is to avoid the problems current copyright laws create for the sharing of information.

About: Flickr’s use of Creative Commons

“We allow members to select a default Creative Commons license for all photos they upload and the ability to control licensing on a photo-by-photo basis. This gives people the most flexibility. And I think it does solve a real problem for some people: they want to be able to post their photos on the web and still express their preference as to how their work gets used.” –Flickr’s founder, Stewart Butterfield

Permission: Needed or Not?

Under copyright law, nobody is allowed to copy your work without your permission. But under a Creative Commons license, permission is not required for it has already been granted up front. Every Creative Commons license I can find says you are free “to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work.” You don’t have to ask the owner up front and you don’t even have to inform them that you used their work. So long as you meet the license characteristics, you are good to go.

Attribution: Always Required

Though permission is not needed, all six Creative Commons licenses require attribution, stating “Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.”

If the author states how attribution is to be used up front, then everything is clear. But I can’t find a single Creative Commons image on Flickr that states how attribution should be made. Does this mean you must first ask the author how attribution should be made, or do you just make sure you provide attribution in a clear manner?

I think this is a shortcoming of the Creative Commons license. I share 7,000 personal images and 10,000 Lambda Chi Alpha images on Flickr via the Creative Commons license. I use the CC license because is scales very well for my needs. People are able to use my work without bugging me for permission. I don’t have the time to respond to every permission and attribution request. Neither Creative Commons nor Flickr offer a way to specify up front how attribution should be made.

Attribution: Count thy Ways

There are so many ways to attribute credit to someone’s work. Over at Cross & Crescent, I do so in three ways:

Hyperlink

I link the image directly back to the source file residing on Flickr. This gives the author greater exposure and gives users the ability to add comments, tags, or just email the author.

ALT description

I also add a description to the anchor tag that goes something like this: alt=”Courtesy of Jason Pearce”. This message pops up on some browsers when the mouse hovers over the image.

Fine Print

At the bottom of each story, I include some fine print under the heading “Photo Credits in Order of Appearance.” As you might expect, textual credit like “© Courtesy MIT Museum, All Rights Reserved” appears in this section.

Other Methods

But is that enough? Is that what the author wanted? Perhaps not. And since I didn’t ask, I had one author express concern that attribution was not provided for he was expecting to see attribution directly below his photograph instead of at the bottom of the page. Though he was using a Creative Commons license, he didn’t state up front how attribution should be made.

Share Without Asking

I use the CC license because I a) like to share and b) don’t want to be bothered every time someone wants to use an image of mine.

I’ve learned, however, that some users of the CC license expect users to ask for permission before their work is used. If they want to control permission, then maybe a Copyright license would serve them better.

Permission just doesn’t scale well for a permission-is-already-granted project like Creative Commons.

For example, when I write some code or design a theme and release it to the public domain under an open source license, I don’t expect people to ask me for permission before using my work. I don’t even expect them to tell me when they have used my code.

But since Creative Commons is new, it might take some time for all of us to understand how it should be used.

I’m in the market for a used car, and this site has a great mashup of two useful sites. Dude, where’s my used car?