Maybe these sites do need to start respecting Creative Commons data when its provided. Of course, we then need to configure the blogging clients to publish the license details in the first place – I know that in Movable Type it was added to my RSS 1.0 feed but not my 2.0 feed.

Oh, you can certainly argue the facts, since the confluence of technology and copyright clearly is *not* his strength.

The Web is made up of a never-ending series of proxy servers, caching mechanisms, and mirrors… they’re the foundation of the whole thing, the engine that makes “poor” Martin’s publishing possible. And most (if not all) of those tools and technologies violate the letter of his license every bit as much as Bloglines.

Earthlink takes his images and HTML, compresses them, and distributes them to paying users. Microsoft takes his pages, reformats them, and distributes them to paying MSNTV users. Corporate firewalls filter out any of his content they feel appropriate. Google caches the full text of his content. The list just goes on and on.

“To that end, perhaps we should be browbeating web-based services … to incorporate CC license recognition intelligence into their services and use it to filter out content…”

As the owner of such a service, my answer would be “Forget it.” The CC licenses are open to broad interpretation, and are wholly inappropriate for any machine-level examination. (Not to mention that the existing mechanisms for embedding licensing info in feeds are absolutely awful.)

I posted an article about good RSS citizenship a while back, and most of its suggestions boil down to personal responsibility. If Schwimmer doesn’t want his content reproduced, he can truncate his feeds. He can put them behind an authentication gateway. He can block Bloglines’ IP address at the server level.

In return, those of us writing feed-consuming apps can respect his efforts. If he blocks my server, I won’t try to get around the block. If one of my users redistributes his password protected feed, I’ll ban the user. If he puts a partial-content feed first among his autodiscovery links, I’ll default to using it.

It’s about working together and understanding the environment we share.

And that’s why this is an important issue we need to resolve now before it’s too late.

Yes, the CC licenses are open to broad interpretation, and I think that might be something we need to fix. Russell Beattie astutely observes:

I’ve come to the conclusion that since commercial search engines and aggregators don’t charge for the content they serve, they should not be subject to non-commercial licenses or general copyright infringement. I think this is the border of fair use. They make money through the value they add to the content, not the content itself. The difference is subtle but important. That said, Creative Commons should make it *very* clear that advertising around the non-commercial marked content is against their license if they think so, or no if not. I don’t think they’ve made it clear, please correct me if I’m wrong.

Exactly. We all seem to agree that what Bloglines is doing is acceptable by our standards, but it’s apparently not acceptable Martin’s standards. There will be others like him who disagree with our beliefs – our only option is to protect ourselves and these services by demonstrating that when everyone plays the game the same way, everyone wins.

http://www.generalcounsel.net/wiredgc/index.php?p=22