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The Anne Rice Memorial Content License

Posted by misuba at 09:51 AM

Remember when Anne Rice took out that two-page ad in the New Yorker and other publications, on the eve of the release of the film version of Interview with the Vampire? She added a notice on her long, somewhat defensive statement on the film - a notice stating that any media source could quote her as long as they quoted the entire two-page statement.

This, of course, guaranteed that no one would quote her; they'd just talk about her statement in vague ways because they didn't have the room to reprint it. So maybe Rice's decision wasn't useful the way she thought it would be, and maybe it was. But some recent talk about the Creative Commons licenses, and other free software-inspired legal licenses for text and other media content, has me thinking. Via Creative Commons' own weblog, here's a bit from attorney Tim Hadley (I'm trying to help the word "attorney" become part of his name, like Mighty Joe Young) quoting, er, someone named Phil:

Suppose you write a heartfelt and deeply personal post about the difficulties of academic life. If someone from academic-challenges.com asks to republish it, you would probably say yes. If someone from whiney-pointyheads.com asked, you would probably say no, if it wasn't for the fact that you've already said yes by virtue of your CC license.

A licensing option (that won't make sense unless you've read about Creative Commons' licensing app and general mission, which you should really do) that lets you forbid the partial quoting of your content, would not ameliorate problems like the above. It may also already be covered under the "derivative works" options CC already provides. If not, it may in fact actually fly in the face of fair use - briefly quoting things for sake of argument or study has pretty much always been legal. We don't even know for sure if Anne Rice's stipulation on her New Yorker statement would stand up in court.

We do, however, already know that quoting out of context is a political weapon of great power. It might improve our national discourse to eliminate some of that power. And when it comes to the whole machine-readable, "metadata" side of CC, this would be easily integrated into a sufficiently smart set of social software. Any software smart enough to observe these kinds of licenses, though, would be smart enough to break them as well.

Just some preliminary thoughts. Good idea? Bad idea?

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Brief public service announcement

Posted by misuba at 04:21 AM

Mozilla, everyone's favorite web browser/mail client for sufficiently small definitions of 'everyone,' has added junk mail filtering to their latest version. The beta of 1.3 is stable in my experience, and is available here. If you haven't given Moz a try yet, now's a good time.

link here

Whuffie for beginners

Posted by misuba at 01:30 AM

It's a currency, it's a trust metric, it's a chewy candy treat! Actually it's destined to be just another geeky buzzword, but it's kind of fun to think about the possibilities.

Sorry for my long absence; the time I blew on RSSwanker has had to be made up for, work-wise. RW will go 1.0 once I commit to writing usernames and passwords into it, as I have realized how bloody insecure my cookie scheme is.

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