great cc news. Dave has posted instructions for placing a Creative Commons license in the RSS feed generated from a Manila weblog.

This is great news. We have launched a campaign to build a layer of reasonable copyright law in a world increasingly defined by the extremes. CC tags — comments; marks expressing freedom beyond fair use — is an important first step. Web logs have been the most important early adopters. With Movabletype, and now Userland, the most active and vibrant community on the web is beginning to show the rest something between the extremes.

[Source: Lessig Blog]
8:13:25 PM    

a respectful quibble with the Doc. Doc has a great post pushing public domain dedications of content. But on the way to his valuable recommendation, Doc writes,

“I believe what Userland and the Creative Commons people have made here is, literally, a DRM — digital rights management — system, in the best possible sense of the acronym.”

I think it is useful and important to distinguish between DRM and DRE — digital rights management vs. digital rights expression. DRE is a technology simply (1) to express rights. The “management” in DRM implies a technology — code — both (1) to express rights and (2) to enforce it.

But for all of the reasons that the DMCA debate has made clear, there are lots of problems with DRM systems precisely because code is used to enforce copyright rights. Code can never accurately map fair use, it can never reserve a right to criticize the existing expanse of control, etc.

DRE is therefore DRM minus the management. A DRE system simply enables an efficient way for people to say what freedoms they are enabling. In a world where the default is “all rights reserved,” CC DRE enables a simple way for people to say “My content is free in the following ways.”

That CC freedom is of course in addition to the freedoms guaranteed by “fair use.” But “fair use” is not, in our view, enough. The Commons needs a richer range of freedoms than the freedoms guaranteed by “fair use.” CC thus enables people voluntarily to increase the freedom around their content.

We believe saying CC-free is an important step for many reasons. But we also think it is importantly different from technologies that would make computers the enforcers of the limits on that freedom. DRE is therefore not DRM.

Finally, one technical point: Our CC licenses expressly state that you can’t use our technology with a DRM system that does not adequately protect “fair use.” As I’ve not seen a DRM system that adequately protects “fair use” yet, imho, that means you are not allowed to use a CC licenses with a DRM system yet. At least that is so if you take seriously the commitments the CC license imposes.

[Source:Lessig Blog]
8:11:57 PM    

OPML and Directories.

Dave Winer writes about a topic I will be covering in my forthcoming Tech Talk series (starting next week):

There's no single root of the Web, so why should directories (like Yahoo, DMOZ, Looksmart) have single roots? And therein lies the problem with directories, and why we're not effectively cataloging the knowledge of our species on the Internet.

A case in point. Last week I pointed to a great directory of RSS aggregators. So why not also have it available in a format that allows it to be included in other directories? I should be able to include it in the directory I keep for RSS developers. Why should I have to reinvent the wheel? Would he want me to? And maybe it fits into a directory of tools that are useful for librarians, alongside book inventory software; or in a directory for lawyers, alongside legal databases. See the point? There is no single address for a directory, every directory is a sub-directory of something, yet all the directories we build on the Internet try to put everything in exactly one place, which leads to some really ludicrous placements. My Windows software is categorized under Mac software because we were only available on Mac when it was first categorized. This one-category-for-all-information approach is a vestige of paper catalogs, not a limit of computer-managed catalogs.

I'm burning to get this idea broadly implemented. When we do, the Web will grow by another order of magnitude.

The challenge: Put all that we know on the Internet and give people the tools to present it in a myriad of ways. Let a thousand flowers bloom. No one owns the keys to knowledge. That's Jeffersonian software. The Web, of course, was modeled after the printed page, with all its limits. This new Web is modeled after the mind of man.

Here's a small snapshot of what I have started writing. Have titled it "Constructing the Memex".

Imagine if each of us could build out personal directories [^] outlines of topics and connections to other directories, people and documents. Much of this would happen automatically as we browsed and marked pages of interest, embellishing them with our comments. When we search, it would first scan our world of relevant information rather than the world wide web of documents.

In other words, each of us would have a microcosm of the information space, created and updated continuously by what we did. It would ensure that our ideas would have a context, that we would never forget something, and that we could leverage on similar work done by millions of others like us. This is the real two-way web [^] linking not just documents, but people, ideas and information.

Vannevar Bush imagined just such a system [^] in 1945. He called it the Memex.

It is where we want to take BlogStreet.

[Source:E M E R G I C . o r g]
8:05:24 PM