If you want to retain the “ShareAlike” (copyleft) clause in the license you chose instead, you may want to use a license that is designed to protect software. The CC licenses don’t make any source/object distinction, for example. Unlike the GNU GPL/LGPL, they wouldn’t prevent someone from distributing derivative works in a compiled or obfuscated form. I imagine this is part of what Larry meant when he said that the CC licenses are focused on non-software content.

(Aside: The ShareAlike clause does prevent derivative works from being distributed with “technological measures” that prevent the recipient from exercising rights granted by the license. But it does not seem to require that derivative works be distributed in an easily-modified format. The Creative Commons itself is distributing a Flash animation under a ShareAlike license, without providing the “uncompiled” source file for easy modification. For audio and video works, it’s not clear exactly what the preferred “source” format would be. If these issues are a concern, use a copyleft license with source distribution requirements like the GPL.)

Regardless of the license you choose, remember that it restricts only your copyrighted work, and works that are considered derivative under copyright law.

So, same question. Keep or toss the license? And, if kept, how?

Regarding the effect of publication on future patent claims on a method: you say the license has bearing, but how so? Doesn’t the mere fact of publication take care of that?

If I retain the CC license, how would you recommend that I use it?

Thanks.

Also, your use of the license has bearing on any future patents. Whether you license the work or not, its publication prevents valid patents of any identical methods “invented” after yours.

Would we consider an RSS feed to be software?

It’s fuzzy, and the licenses weren’t optimized for software, but I tend to think of RSS files as pretty close to the spirit of the licenses for text files, when applied to the text content contained within them. Jon Udell’s js is a little closer to software and fuzzier still.

Would it make sense to put CCL information about a resource into a feed that contains an excerpt of that resource? Or is the CCL attached to the resource all that’s needed.

It’s optional to put the license info in a feed, but seems fine to do that. If I were a publisher looking to reprint something of yours I read in my RSS reader, if I didn’t see the CC license info on the RSS file, I would likely check our site as well. It’s not a requirement but seems nice.

If a CCL attached to a RSS feed differs from that attached to the resource directly, I’ve heard that we’re to interpret this to mean we pick which CCL to apply. But RSS is usually machine generated — wouldn’t want assume, then, that the RSS feed could be error, and one should support the CCL within the resource directly.

You’re talking about a situation that is best solved by not applying differing licenses. If I’m a musician and I put out different versions of our band’s MP3s (of the same song) under different licenses, there’s going to be confusion. Ideally, people should apply the same license to their RSS file as their weblog. If not, you might want to ask our lawyers directly if one gets to choose which license they prefer.

If the CCL is attached to the RSS feed itself, exactly what does unaltered copies of the work mean in this instance? Display the markup? Or the items?

The spirit of the text file license coverage is about the content within, not the markup surrounding it, be they HTML or Word macros. I would interpret this as the item content.

If a CCL is propagated with the RSS feed, do aggretators (tools that redisplay the info or publish it such as O’Reilly’s Meerkat, and News is Free), need to also display the CCL?

Practically speaking, it’s a brand new feature for RSS and I wouldn’t expect readers or aggregators to have support for it. I think it’d be nice if they redisplayed it, but it’s up to the aggregator writer to implement.

And when CCL is attached to resources that are in some variation of XHHTML, exactly what does it apply to? The content? Or the look and feel of the site? All of the above as a package? Or do we need to have CCL for page design, and CCL for content. Or is one CCL embedded in a page tantamont to saying “this applies to everything — design and content”?

For HTML, it applies to the content on the page. Ideally, if you wanted to apply a license to everything on a page, you could state that in a way that makes it clear to visitors what your intention is, but the licenses were designed to cover the text, and not everything else on the page.

There’s a important point about the “distance” between a license and the intended content to be licensed. The farther that distance, the more potential for confusion. Imagine a page of your songs in MP3. You could put one license on the page saying all songs are under it, but you could also put the license URL directly into the ID3 tags on the songs. From the perspective of a new visitor or bot, you could see how the distance shrinking to embedded on the file makes that very clear, versus a blanket license on the page.

If you embedded RDF directly into your HTML files, and into each and every image using GIF, PNG, and JPEG comment metadata, it might be possible to shrink that distance between the licenses and the content to make it easier for machines to understand what is licensed. Otherwise, you’ll have to explain your intentions on your site. Without an explanation, the assumption is the text of your site is licensed.

And you also say the CC encourages incorporation of license data into RSS feeds. Why?

I think it’s just to help with the dissemination of information. If I have a photo blog with the images licensed, and I have an RSS feed of the last five photos, I might as well carry that license over to make it clear to people how they can resuse my photos.

If I can let people know about my intentions in two places instead of one, why not do so?

Wouldn’t one search for content first, and then look at license? And the license would be attached to the content.

If you had a specific re-use in mind (“I need to get a photo for this collage I’m using in my college art show”), and you knew of a license that allowed for your intended reuse, why wouldn’t you search first on the licenses?

If you look at a place like Getty Images, you can search on the license types, which I do all the time. If I need an image for a client’s site, I often restrict my searches to only Photodisc’s content (Getty is an umbrella site to about 5 big stock photography houses) since I know all the images I get back I can afford (photodisc images are around $30 for web use, while another Getty image by Tony Stone Images can go for upwards of $1,000 per use, per year).

If you searched by content first, yes the license would be attached, and that’d be one way of doing it. But if you had a specific resuse in mind it should be possible to search by license first. I don’t see any harm in offering two methods of finding things in a search engine.

Also, RSS feeds have no persistence. An item rolls off the feed just as quickly as it rolls on. RSS feeds really wouldn’t be effective sources of persistent data for future discovery.

Right, which is why I consider them as temporary duplicate representations of content. If I really want to license your essay about RDF, I’ll go to your site and find it. I wouldn’t use RSS as a first point to search for archived content because that’s not what it was designed for.