On Jan 16, 2008 1:39 PM, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.com wrote:
Treating everything that comes out of CC like poison is as unuseful as treating everything that comes out of CC like gold. The question is: what would the benefits for Commons be? And I see the answer as better machine readability and the general benefits that eventually come from standardisation. Not tomorrow, but if in a few years people go "oh yeah, CC-0, I'm familiar with that from X,Y & Z other sites" then... everyone benefits.
Arguably the words "public domain" should be within spitting distance of CC0's near-term potential in terms of recognition and uniformity in practice.
If there is not enough public understanding of the words "public domain", then I think efforts would be better spent on educating people about the meaning of "public domain" rather than though additional fragmentation of the same body of work.
If, on the other hand, the CC0 grant included some kind of binding warranty on the copyright status of the work, then I think it would potentially provide great value as an alternative to PD-self (although not a replacement, because a warranty-providing grant wouldn't be isomorphic). This isn't an outrageous suggestion. The original CC license had a property along these lines, but it was removed based on objections from (I think) bloggers who just wanted to re-distribute stuff without considering that aspect.
I am highly skeptical of vague mentions of "reputation systems". I think we need to see an established and proven solution before we go about standardizing on a single interface.
Reputation systems are very trendy right now among people who produce many ideas but few implementations. Since reputation does not appear to have the transitive property (that is, knowing A trusts B and B trusts C still does not tell us about A's trust of C), it remains to be seen if these systems can offer value in the real world. Even if they can, standardizing on an interface prematurely may stunt the development of better systems that actually do work.
(Warranties do offer clearly established real world value, on the other hand, and I'd have no problem offering a reasonably-scoped binding promise of non-infringement on works that I created.)
Wikimedia Commons today has probably the closest to a working large-scale community copyright system, but it's nowhere near done enough or formalized enough to code into some RDF data. It's a very lossy system with a lot of failures, but it is clearly better than nothing at all, which is what a lot of other user-contributed repositories have.
As far as I can tell, CC0 as proposed is primarily a branding exercise.
If it is successful, then using it at some point in the future might be beneficial for us. But as it stands, this is an instance where we should probably be following and not leading, since it would appear to confer no advantage to us, and it may potentially result in creating more confusion due to the already heavily overloaded term "creative commons".
On the other hand, unlike some other branding exercises, I don't see this one as actively detrimental to our mission. There may be value in supporting it if only so no one can claim that we are "treating everything that comes out of CC like poison", when our positions really are more nuanced than that.
(and shame shame Brianna, I think Geni's position was more nuanced than you gave him credit for! :) )