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.  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.

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 Commons
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.)

This week in class, four students argued whether the Philadelphia
wireless policy was a sensible model for municipalities around the
world.  They did a remarkable job.  Their work is set down
for others to see, here, on a class wiki
that includes each of their arguments for and against the policy as a
model for other municipalities.  I am sure they’d like comments —
if you e-mail them to me at jpalfrey AT law.harvard.edu I’d be happy to
pass them along to the class.

I’ve assigned a substantial portion of Dan Gillmor’s We the Media
for class this coming Monday in Internet, Law and Politics at Harvard
Law School.  Turns out that the book is sold-out of most of the
Harvard Square bookstores, checked out of the libraries, etc. 
(Not to worry; we’ve ordered some more.)  What is so cool is that
it’s not a problem: Dan and O’Reilly have offered it free-for-download, in its entirety.  How cool is that?  No scarcity, even when there is scarcity.  No one will go unenlightened!

Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon, the founders of Global Voices, are the guests for today’s class at Harvard Law School in Internet, Law and Politics. 

– Ethan’s made clear that GV is a complement to mainstream media, and
not a supplement.  “You’d be crazy,” he said, “to rely on Global
Voices alone for your world news.”  Despite its rapid growth and
early successes in its first 14 months, GV is a work-in-progress and
one that supplements, not replaces, the news that is offered by other
(professional) journalists and informal sources not rounded up on GV.

– Rebecca says that neither blogs nor Internet makes democracies
stronger; “people make democracies stronger” and in some cases use
technologies to get it done.

– Ethan says that the places where Internet — in the hands of the
right users — can have a positive impact on democracy is in places
where the media environment is relatively closed. 

– Ethan focuses also on Bridge Bloggers — Ory Okolloh, the Kenyan Pundit (and HLS ’05), and Mahmood
of Bahrain — who write not just for a local audience, but for a global
audience who are listening in to what’s happening in their home
countries, as an example of making a particular difference through
their work.

– Rebecca notes that while we are, in the US, focused on the US
companies-in-China story, the real story that the Chinese blogosphere
is paying attention to is the Steamed Bun Controversy (worth exploring, trust me).

We’ve heard from a number of people about an uneasy (and unfounded) sense that something is happening with respect to the RSS 2.0 spec.  Just by way of clarification, nothing has changed from the perspective of Harvard, which is the owner and trustee of the RSS 2.0 spec.  To review the bidding, a few years ago, Userland, a private company, entered into a contract with Harvard to transfer ownership of all intellectual property associated with the RSS 2.0 spec.  Harvard, in turn, offers the specification to anyone for their use, subject to a legally-binding Creative Commons license.  Anyone or any group may do anything it wants with the spec, but only subject to the terms of the license.  That is still the case.  Harvard has not transferred the ownership in any way to anyone, other than the original and continuing grant to the community via the Creative Commons license.  We take seriously our rights as holders of the spec and our responsibility as trustees of the spec.  While we are delighted to know that many members of the RSS community continue to work on relevant issues to move the industry along in various ways, including related to the spec itself, Harvard has no involvement with any of these efforts.  Our role and our posture in this matter has not changed.

My written testimony for the hearings today in the United States House
of Representatives Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee
on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations and
Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, is here.

Today in “Internet, Law and Politics,” a course at HLS, students are debating whether or not the Dean Campaign’s online campaigning activities changed campaigning for ever.  One side has posted here and the other is here. 

Please comment online, or, if you read this between 4:45 – 6:45 EST on Monday, Feb. 13, send me mail at jpalfrey AT law.harvard.edu and I will read them to the class during the debate.  Many thanks.

February 8, 2006

TO:  MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

You are respectfully requested to attend the following OPEN joint
hearing of the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and
International Operations and the Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific,
to be held in Room 2172 of the Rayburn House Office Building:

DATE:                      
Wednesday, February 15, 2006

TIME:                       
10:00 a.m.

SUBJECT:    The Internet in China: A Tool for Freedom or Suppression?

WITNESSES:         Panel I
                    Mr. James Keith
              
     Senior Advisor for China and Mongolia
              
     Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs
                    U.S. Department of State

                The Honorable David Gross
              
 Deputy Assistant Secretary
                Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs
                U.S. Department of State

Panel II
                    Mr. Michael Callahan
                    General Counsel
                    Yahoo! Inc.
                    
                    Mr. Jack Krumholtz
              
     Managing Director of Federal Government
Affairs and
              
          Associate General
Counsel
                    Microsoft Corporation
                    
                    Mr. Elliot Schrage
               
     Vice President for Corporate Communications
              
          and Public Affairs
                    Google, Inc.
                    
                    Mr. Mark Chandler
              
     Vice President and General Counsel
                    Cisco Systems, Inc.

Panel III
                    Ms. Libby Liu
                    President
                    Radio Free Asia
                    
                    Mr. Xiao Qiang
                    Director
                    China Internet Project
              
     University of California-Berkeley
                    
                    Ms. Lucie Morillon
                    Washington Representative
                    Reporters Without Borders

                    Mr. Harry Wu
                    Publisher
                    China Information Center  

NOTE:  Witnesses may be added or changed.

By Direction of the Chairman

The Committee on International Relations seeks to make its facilities
accessible to persons with disabilities.  If you are in need of
special accommodations, please call 202/225-5021 at least four business
days in advance of the event, whenever practicable.  Questions
with regard to special accommodations in general (including
availability of Committee materials in alternative formats and
assistive listening devices) may be directed to the Committee as noted
above.

Fred Wilson has an excellent blog post
on the topic of online syndication and the future of digital
entertainment.  He’s been nailing this issue for a long time
now.  This is great free consulting for the content publishing
industry:

“Here’s the bottom line. In the digital medium, the content should be
syndicated as broadly as possible. If iTunes wants to charge $1.99 for
the shows, let them.  If WRAL wants to stream the shows with ads
(and download them for a small fee), let them.

CBS should do the same on its website.  I think they should offer
RSS feeds of every show in their lineup.  The service should be
either subscription driven or ad supported or ideally offer both
options.

This is the digital medium we are talking about.  Bits are
bits.  They are going to get widely distributed anyway. 
That’s how this medium works.  If CBS understands that, they’ll
forget about exclusivity, which doesn’t work online anyway, and make
their content ubiquitious, monetize it with whatever business models
their distribution partners want to use, take a cut of the action, and
they should do the same themselves on their websites and then sit back
and watch the digital medium work its magic.”

I missed it earlier in the day (and didn’t see it in the hearing room),
but Andrew McLaughlin (disclosure: long-time Berkman fellow and friend) has posted to the Google blog a statement about their offering in China.  The news in the statement, to me, is their recommended next steps, with which I broadly agree:

“1. Expanded Dialogue and Outreach. For more than a year, Google has
been actively engaged in discussion and debate about China with a wide
range of individuals and organizations both inside and outside of
China, including technologists, businesspeople, government officials,
academic experts, writers, analysts, journalists, activists, and
bloggers. We aim to expand these dialogues as our activities in China
evolve, in order to improve our understanding, refine our approach, and
operate with openness.

2. Voluntary Industry Action. Google supports the idea of Internet
industry action to define common principles to guide technology firms’
practices in countries that restrict access to information. Together
with colleagues at other leading Internet companies, we are actively
exploring the potential for Internet industry guidelines, not only for
China but for all countries in which Internet content is subjected to
governmental restrictions. Such guidelines might encompass, for
example, disclosure to users, and reporting about governmental
restrictions and the measures taken in response to them.

3. Government-to-Government Dialogue. In addition to common action by
Internet companies, there is an important role for the United States
government to address, in the context of its bilateral
government-to-government relationships, the larger issues of free
expression and open communication. For example, as a U.S.-based company
that deals primarily in information, we have urged the United States
government to treat censorship as a barrier to trade.”

The first strikes me as mostly fluff, though certainly right, so far as
it goes.  The second and third both seem to be sound, and
potentially meaningful, next steps.  On the third one, I think the
US should stop worrying about ICANN as an international Internet
governance issue and start treating censorship and surveillance as the
key international issue in our field.