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April 13, 2005
little britain
The Creative Archive licence site is live, and I really wish I could get excited about it. There are three additions to the Creative Commons non-commercial attribution share-alike licence that in essence change the philosophy somewhat.
My big bugbear, being an expat, is the UK only part of the licence. This is justified, the faq says, because
The delivery of content in the Creative Archive is paid for by the organisations who supply it. They are funded with public money to serve the UK population, and therefore they are restricted from subsidising services to overseas audiences.
If this is the reason, then it should not be enshrined in the legalese of the licence, rather just in the services that let you download the material. This would let 3rd parties such as archive.org deliver to the rest of the world. I *have* paid for this material to be created - so why won't I be allowed to access it?
Weirdly the licence doesn't mention actually viewing the material at all, just giving you a licence to copy, share, or create derivative works. Does this mean if I download from someone in the UK I'm fine? What about showing a documentary containing excepts from the creative archive outside of the UK?
The second disappointment is that material cannot be used for any derogatory or 'otherwise offensive' purpose. This is hard to define, at best, and at worst could be used against any free speech usage of the material (not that the UK has much free speech enshrined in law).
The final problem is that the licence is revocable, and changable. This means with a change in the political wind, the licence could change, and there's nothing you can do about it. If you're going to be spending time creating work based on these materials, you need a steadier legal base.
The US has benefitted greatly from making all Goverment sponsored work freely available on the Internet - notably the TIGER street database, and all NASA imagery. There are no restrictions on who can download, and how it can be used. Maybe we should look to this for how British Government funded material should be distributed.
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Comments
not to nitpick Chris (which is what people always say before doing just that :), but there are, off the top of my head, some quite reasonable restrictions on "endorsement"-style commercial use of NASA images and footage:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/insignia/text/commercial.html
Many NASA images in the public domain can be used for merchandising purposes.
However, there are rules regarding the appearance of NASA employees' faces or names on commercial products. NASA employees, including astronauts, who are currently employed by NASA cannot have their faces or names displayed on any commercial products, advertisements or commercial product packaging. NASA employees who are retired from the Agency can grant permission for the use of their faces or names, but that permission may be subject to a fee. For deceased employees, their families must grant permission for use of their photos or names.
[...]
NASA does not permit use of the insignia and other NASA indicia in advertisements except for the NASA Logo on the Space Shuttle when it is displayed at a distance. Any use of the NASA identity on spacesuits is generally not permitted unless authorized by Headquarters Public Affairs.
Posted by: Dave at April 13, 2005 10:45 PM
I was actually worried in the other direction about the revokability stuff. It's not necessarily clear what the future is going to bring, but one big concern for the BBC should be whether or not in the future it might be forced to go commercial or to operate without the license fee. In those circumstances, when everyone else is suddenly capitalising on their archives in long tail fashion, to be the only organisation without a commercially exploitable archive could be catastrophic. I'm not saying that it would be, or that this circumstance is likely, just that the future is at the moment very very unclear and I think it could have been irresponsible of them to do significant things that couldn't be undone.
Posted by: Tom Coates at April 14, 2005 01:59 AM
