Idea: Creative Source Licenses

Since the firestorm over RSS and copyright in January, I’ve been talking to a lot of people — those who publish blogs and mainstream media, those who aggregate online sources, those who worry over these things in the legal profession — about the strange place we find ourselves as an online community. 

There’s still a lack of clarity about what publishers — bloggers, mainstream media, or whomever is offering an RSS, Atom, OPML, or other XML-based feed of creative content — allow other people to do with their copyrighted material.  It is unclear what we can TRUST online when it comes to content, what is credible. Meanwhile, creativity abounds and aggregation moves forward at a blistering pace.

What I think I’ve heard is that every blogger expects that other people will, at a minimum, be able to render your works in an aggregator for personal use, or else they would not be offering an XML feed.  Virtually everyone has seemed to think that the rendering a limited portion of your feed and its headline, for commercial or non-commercial use, so long as there’s a link back to your site from the aggregator, is OK.  Some people have also stated that full rendering of your feed for any purpose, so long as there’s attribution and a link back, is also fine.  (Separately, a lot of people would like to be paid for usage in a commercial context if full-text is used.) 

Others have noticed that Creative Commons licenses, (of which I am an ENORMOUS fan), which are wonderful, are not quite ideal for usage in the RSS context.  Fair enough.  But CC licenses would plainly be the starting point, since so much amazing work has gone into drafting them.

And the background is, as it must be, the relevant copyright law. As such, without waiving my rights to anything on this blog, I don’t consent to the use of the content on this blog for commercial uses, for instance.

So, as a next step, I think the most sensible thing to do is to establish a set of common licenses, based on the Creative Common model, that set out the following five options, expressed in human-readable and lawyer-readable (as a first step) and machine-readable (as a second step).  Here are five options, in human-readable form:

Option 1: Full-text republication, with attribution and link-back:
I consent to the republication of the copyrighted works that I publish via my source, whether alone or repurposed with other sources in a derivative work, with no restriction on how much of the feed is rendered or how it is used, so long as republication involves attribution to me and a link from the aggregator back to the primary page where my source is published by me.

Option 2: Truncated-text republication, with attribution and link-back:
I consent to the republication of the copyrighted works that I publish via my source, whether alone or repurposed with other sources in a derivative work, so long as only 200 words or fewer are included in what is rendered and so long as republication involves attribution to me and a link from the aggregator back to the primary page where my source is published by me.  (This option would presumably be the one that Susan Mernit suggested in the last go-round.)

Option 3: Personal aggregation only:

I consent to the republication of the copyrighted works that I publish via my source, but only for strictly personal, non-commercial use.

Option 4: No aggregation except with permission:

I do not consent to the use of my source for any purpose, except with prior written permission or as required by law.

Option 5: No restriction:

I place no restriction on the use of my source for any purpose.

Of course, these licenses would be grounded in your full copyright as the starting point.  And even if you choose one of these licenses, you’d still be able to enable someone to republish your work, whether or not in exchange for compensation.

Are there other perspectives that would need a standard license?

These five license options would themselves be published under Creative Commons licenses.  A publisher of a source could also register their source and their license preference in a simple online database, to which re-publishers could refer in order to determine the intention of the publisher of the work (you).  A publisher of a source would also be encouraged to place a notation in the feed itself and on the blog or other web page where it is ordinarily rendered to state this preference clearly. 

(Disclaimer: as always, on matters related to RSS and copyright, I should note that I am actively involved in TopTenSources and other entities that have an interest in the outcome of this discussion.  TopTenSources renders truncated RSS feeds and offers the chance for those included in Top10 lists to opt-out at any time.  My full Disclosures page is here.)