#136: Content license policy

Contents
  1. Definitions
  2. Motivation
  3. Proposal
  4. Implementation
  5. Risks
  6. Participants
by Jonah Bossewitch — last modified Jan 21, 2010 07:26 AM

Plone should ship with a complete set of content licensing tools, including support for Creative Commons assignment, which allow for the selection and assignment of licenses to all content created inside of Plone on a per-object basis. Licenses should be correctly stored in the DC:Rights metatdata field, and adherence to creativecommon's best practices (their selection wizard, rdf machine readable rights declarations w/in the templates, etc) should be verified. Uniform, robust, content licensing support.

Proposed by
Jonah Bossewitch
Seconded by
Nate Aune
Proposal type
Process
Assigned to release
State
being-discussed

Definitions

Motivation

As the custodians of pre-eminent publishing platform, the Plone community has the opportunity and responsibility to take the lead on an important social justice issue that threatens culture, creativity, and democracy.

It is critically important - to the future of culture and creativity - that the IP of content be precisely managed. Content whose ownership rights need to be protected should be distinguished from content for which the owners choose to waive some of those righgs. The continuum of rights assignment should be carefully considered on any CMS. When it comes to license metadata, the sweet spot for assignment is at the point of content creation. This means CMS platforms are in a unique position (with a unique responsibility) to provide the tools for license assignment.

Now its culture, content, and creativity that are on the table, not just code. For more background, see Lessig on free culture, Benkler on Freedom in the Commons  or Moglen's dotCommunist Manifesto.

Interestingly, good CC support should also translate into business opportunities within the NGO sector that Plone is targeting. If we have a compelling CC story, we have yet another differentiator between us and the commercial vendors, one which demonstrates synergy and ideological alignment between our community and many of the organizations that Plone companies are pitching and the communities that can help spread the gospel of Plone. The feature can become yet another good reason, perhaps a deciding one, for choosing Plone.


creativecommons.org has built sdk's, license selection wizards, and defined human, and machine readable formats for license information to be embedded in content. See their developers section for details.


We are already real close to being able to offer solid CC support. For Plone 3.0 we should follow through, and verify that it is well integrated and easy to enable.


Proposal

We have a stab at CC support in the collectiv PloneCreativeCommons

There have also been recent efforts to improve CC support in our outgoing RSS feeds

I think that CC licenses should actually be stored in the DC:Rights field, where they belong.

We also probably should work on a control_panel interface that allows site administrators to enable CC assignment on a per-site basis. Perhaps allowing site administrator to define a site-wide license, as opposed to allowing content authors to each select their own.

We may want to consider slightly better integration w/ CC's license selection wizard, as it appears that the current implementation redefines the licenses w/in the Tool.

We also may want to extend advanced search to allow for search according to license.

Finally, we should verify that the formats we are outputting match what CC has defined/expects.

Implementation

Forget about the PloneCreativeCommons UI. I think the best crack at this is similar to the technique that the mediawiki uses upon installation:




Except we would present this wizard in the Rights field of each object.  And hopefully figure out a way not to wipe out the rest of the form submission when returning from the cc wizard.

Presumably, there would be a configuration area in the the control panel which would allow for the site administrator to assign site-wide licenses (or default licenses? Like with the discussion defualt/enabled/disabled feature), and perhaps even move the DC:Rights field from the properties tab to the main content editing tab (like DC:Subject is right now).


(sinlgle) Mediawiki installations are a breeze and it takes < 30 seconds to set one up if you have php/mysql installed. The experience is refreshing, if you have never tried it before.

CC's Web integration guide which covers the cc part of the equation, although other license designations, such as 'all rights reserved', 'public domain', 'GNU Free Documentation License' etc should also be supported.



Risks

Misconception in some circles that we are a bunch of hippies.

Misconception in other circles that we are not a bunch of hippies.

Participants

Jonah Bossewitch


Comments (13)

Jon Stahl Apr 10, 2006 01:56 AM
+1 for the spirit of intent here. Creative Commons licensing extremely important to the future of intellectual freedom. It's the non-code equivalent of open-source licensing. Creative Commons seems to me like a very strong with with my understanding of Plone's values.

While I am sure that there are technical arguments to be made for keeping things like this out of the core, I think this is something that rises to the level of putting our effort where our values are. I would also suggest that attaching appropriate licenses to content is a "core" content management function that a CMS should support out of the box.

We should of course ensure that Creative Commons features are off by default.

Thanks for raising this important issue, Jonah and Nate. :-)
Martin Aspeli Apr 11, 2006 10:54 AM
Guys, I think this is an admirable stance, and I agree to a large extent with your concerns about the world at large. However, this really cannot be part of the core of Plone. We can't force or strongly encourage users to use open licenses for their *content*, we don't even enforce this for their *software*. It will scare a lot of potential adopters off and make us look like a bunch of hippies (not that we are, but it will be taken this way). CC is not appropriate for all kinds of content. Should my internal, confidental documents get this license? What if gets assigned by accident because Plone made it so easy? People are touchy about their content and we need to be seen to protect it, not open it up (yes, I know, CC's not about Copyright Communism, but again, perceptions are a powerful thing).

What I *do* think we should do though, is to think about how we handle content rights in more general terms. If there are specific things we can do to make the selection of content rights easier, and make it easier for site admins to enforce or encourage licenses across the site or on a section-by-section basis, that's very good. Some more thinking about the UI and API for this would be welcome.

With this in place, you could ship a very lightweight PloneCreativeCommons that just plugged into some existing API. This could be the model and the basis of the documentation around this feature. We would encourage it as an example, which would mean that people would get first-hand experience with it. Let them discover it themselves, don't force it down their throats.

Martin
Geoff Davis Apr 12, 2006 05:13 PM
+1 on Martin's suggestion
Jonah Bossewitch Apr 11, 2006 12:07 PM
First, I want to be really clear that I was *not* suggesting that CC be the default license. Is there a political agenda here? Sure. but it is awareness and consciousness raising, not jamming any particular values down anyone's throat. Besides, software always embodies an ideology, whether or not we always consider that.

When it comes to our software, it is GPL, so yes, we are dictating particular adherence to our customers (it needs to stay GPL if its distributed). But, I am not sure what code licenses have to do with content licenses. Yahoo's flickr application allows for CC assignment, and that is a proprietary app, and Yahoo is a publicly held company answerable to the almighty mamon.

Another publicly held company that takes CC seriously is google, which now provides search according to content in their advanced search. CC can be part of a search optimization story. I would also argue that any opportunity to add metadata to digital assets increases their value.

And other CMS, wiki, and blogging platforms, like the mediawiki, ship with full CC support, and that will only grow.

But maybe most importantly, contrary to coming off as hippies, Plone can signify that it takes IP very seriously, which is a mature and professional thing to do. The IP handling can offer people 'full copyright', 'assert fair use', 'public domain', 'cc assignment wizard'. This is all about choice. But to offer people license choices in the 21st century w/out offering them a CC assignment option (preserving their rights) is crazy talk ;-)
Geir Baekholt Apr 12, 2006 07:39 PM
+1 from me (to the Plip).
…But under the condition that the Product/Plip/feature in Plone is named "Content license policy" or something similarily neutral. CC has a hippie "feel" in some markets. Ridicolous, yes, but it is still the case.
I am absolutely in favor of having this in the core and the DC:Rights field. - using the CC licenses and all that is outlined in the plip. The only change needed imho is the name of the implementaion and what it will be referred to as in the future.



 
Jonah Bossewitch Apr 12, 2006 07:55 PM
good point. done. Renamed (and reframed) to a value-neutral plip. The longer body content should probably be reworked as well.

I will reiterate that the proper spin for the non-pro-hippie markets is that Plone takes IP very seriously - which is a professional and mature position. This plip is all about options and choice, although consciousness raising and awareness of the rising importance of these issues is at stake as well.
Geir Baekholt Apr 12, 2006 08:15 PM
I absolutely agree on "he proper spin for the non-pro-hippie markets is that Plone takes IP very seriously". My rename suggestion is purely about twisting the way it feels a bit.
Martin Aspeli Apr 13, 2006 08:52 AM
Okay guys, now that the hippie train has gone, I think we need a bit more detail for this PLIP to make sense. Reading/trying the PloneCreativeCommons product is not an option for busy framework team members and release managers. :)

How do you envisage this working? What new UI will be needed? What degree of flexibility will be needed?
Emyr Thomas May 15, 2006 10:16 AM
I think that simplifying content licensing in general within Plone would be a great idea for private sector companies who have adopted Plone, and would be another strong reason to opt for Plone rather than one of the CMS' out there. My company is a software vendor, and we require users of our site to agree to End User License Agreements before downloading our products. While I think CC do a great job, it's not applicable to every one who uses Plone. but I believe something that makes this easier to manage would strengthen Plone's position in the private sector CMS market.
Nate Aune Jul 14, 2006 07:55 PM
I blogged about the <a href="http://nateaune.com/[…]/a> product that was developed by Brent Lambert during the Big Apple Sprint.
Brent Lambert Sep 21, 2006 09:43 PM
We have just released a finished version of the ContentLicensing Product.

You should find everything you need at the following URLs:

http://plone.org/products/contentlicensing
http://plone.org/products/dublincoreextensions
Matt Lee Jan 11, 2007 11:58 AM
...but you need to be sure which licenses you're talking about. The danger of Creative Commons for me, and it's a sentiment shared with Stallman, is the phrase "Creative Commons license" is so meaningless, because it specifies nothing from full copyright to the public domain, with various permissive licenses and less permissive ones in between.

Do what Mediawiki does if anything - Nothing (ie. full copyright), CC-BY-SA and GNU FDL, but I share Martin's concerns that this could well be a bad thing as well. Maybe a product that ships with Plone, but isn't turned on by default on a site?

Oh, and if you could work out 'Crown Copyright', too, then we might use it at the NHS :)
Jon Stahl Mar 16, 2009 11:58 PM
Brent, David-

It looks to me like ContentLicensing is mature, eggified and pretty nice in all respects. Are you willing to champion this for inclusion in Plone 3.4? It would be a matter of submitting your code to the framework team, responding to feedback, making sure it has solid tests and documentation, "sane" default settings, etc. And of course committing to long-term stewardship/maintenance (bitrot is such a drag).