Oshani Seneviratne – MIT Student by Oneras under CC BY SA

Oshani’s presentation  focused on “Detecting Creative Commons Attribution License Violations with Flickr Images on the World Wide Web.” CC licenses do not come with any easy way to find violations of a license. Her project demonstrates a way to search for violations of flickr images by finding deep links and then checking to see if the use meets the conditions for attribution and then generating a report. This is a real first step to creating assurance that licenses are being followed or at least a way for authors to monitor their works spread online.

Future directions for this technology include:

• adding other licenses
• looking for non-commercial use violations
• checking for the Share-Alike condition
• moving from deep links to hashes or other fingerprinting of content

David Torpie (Office of Economic and Statistical Research at the Queensland Treasury) – Photo by Oneras under CC BY SA

David’s talk focused on the “Government Information Licensing Framework: a multidisciplinary project improving access to Public Sector Information.” In  Australia government works are copyrighted by default and copyright applies to many more works then it is in the US.  Sweat of the brow works like a phone book or a data base with no creativity are copyrighted.  The GILF project gives greater access to Australian government data, to make government more transparent.  The Queensland Treasury uses “digital license management”, or DLM. DLM is a technology to embed license metadata into documents and other works, developed in Java. Benefits include ease of linking from data to license, and finding information based on its license. DLM should not be confused with DRM Digital Rights Management which locks works down with technological barriers.

For real time photos of th Tech Summit check out Oneras‘ photo stream on Flickr.

Mario Pena of Safe Creative – Photography by Joi Ito under a (cc) by

Mario covered the basics of registries:

• pointers to works
• facilitate the sharing of relevant information.
• RDFa and ccREL

He also poineted out the need to create communities around registries that allow users to rate works and add to the credibility of the registries. To help contribute to creating standards for registries check out: Open Standards for Copyright Registry Interop.

Joe Benso of Registered Commons – Photography by Joi Ito under a (cc) by license

This presentation focused on the needs for registry authority to be successful. Main features offered by RC , include:

• CC AP,
• time stamping of works (to create a baseline creation date or at least registration date)
• physical identity verification (email verification and Credit Card)
• Moral Rights preferences (this is a large addition beyond the CC basics)

Joe recognized the need for an authority to allocate namespaces, appoint registries based on criteria, identify entities to be certified.

Q&A: How robust are these registries, can they track title and provide authentication of user identities?

The need to track title on copyright could be built into registries and is traditional part of both copyright and patent registrations. Currently title transfer is not supported but this is an option for the future. If registries are build in they right way we should be able to crowd source some of rights clearing. This is essential long term for real commercial viability of CC works.

This was a great session, there were lots of questions. A full day could be dedicated to this topic in a year or two when registries start to mature.

PS: The images in this post are from the last tech summit. Fred Benenson is taking photos at this event and should have them up soon.

Opening statements by: Hal Ableson (MIT, Creative Commons Board of Directors)

- Photo By: User:ALM_scientist/Contributions

Hal spoke about the basics goals of CC Tech.  CC licenses provide interoperability in the form of legal code CC Tech through RDFa allows for distributed embedding of metadata in web pages to make the licenses interoperable on the meta data level.  RDFa has been accepted as a W3C recommendation. CC and others are developing inherently distributed technologies that are inherently extensible. Clear interoperability is the goal.

Hal also touted the as-yet-unreleased book Viral Spiral: how the commoners built a digital republic of their own as a story of what we have accomplished, and what more is possible.

First speaker Nathan R. Yergler (Creative Commons CTO)

Photo by Joi under CC-BY

CC Network has three basic functions; a CC Network web page where members can claim works and create an online profile, Open Idea and a work registry.

To date over 650 people have joined the CC Network.  Each network profile contains a Screen Name: Example Sarterus and a Confirmed Name: Example Brian Rowe a list of claimed works and a short bio.

For OpenID CC has implemented a few privacy and security best practices:

• No 3rd party Analytics
• Minimal log retention
• SSH verification

The work registry allowsa users to claim works in two ways:

• “claim” a work (works are defined by a single URL)
• wild card claiming: IE claim everything at a domain (ie I claim all works that start with Sarterus.com)

For people that want a more complete blow by blow  Frank is also live-blogging the event @ the CC Labs blog.