The Long Trail

Lucas Gonze just blogged about our endeavours here and brought some very interesting points to light.

Firstly, that the primary stakeholders in a licensing and attribution microformat - at least in the early stages - are commercial copyright holders. I completely agree. They will immediately see the benefit of a standardised, machine-readable way to say how media is licensed and where it came from. But he also says:

…non-commercial users don’t care about copyright. They know zero about it, they don’t know of any reason to care, and they aren’t going to change.

That’s true too for the most part but I don’t think it applies as generally as it’s posed. Remember all the rules about photocopying things from your library? This used to be where copyright intersected with normal people’s lives and it was a little jarring. All of a sudden there was an invisible hand guiding what you could and couldn’t do. Now copyright is a pretty hot issue and there’s a much greater awareness and understanding (along with a hefty amount of misunderstanding of course) than the 15-year-old trying make copies of “The Joy of Sex” at the library ever had. Are we all Geist-ian copyright gurus? No, far from it, but it’s never had the mind share it has now and I don’t think we can ignore that trend. In fact, at least in Canada, copyright is evidently now cool!

The other thing that makes me feel that this may have a larger audience than strictly commercial copyright holders is that the licensing/copyright portion is only a part of this format. The other part is attribution. This is a concept that everyone gets and in the blogging, twittering, commenting, media mash-up world the connections between media are important. They’re like trackbacks. They’re part networking, part status, part informational and they help build and strengthen communities. This is described well in an article by Danny O’Brien, Copyright, Fraud and Window Taxes (No, not that Windows) referred to us by Blaise Alleyne. Danny states there are two sides to the copyright issue:

The Copying
The Attribution

In today’s economy the act of copying is cheap and easy and has little value, but attribution has immense value in the creative process and the creators themselves. Bloggers like Miss604 are going out of their way to ensure they are providing attribution. A standardized attribution format - especially when paired with publishing tools - will offer another way to create these links.

So let’s talk about attribution. Lucas has important perspectives on attribution gained through authoring XSPF.

… in XSPF there is an element for giving attribution to the sources of derived works. The idea is that one person would incorporate another person’s playlist into their own, and would use this element to give credit. It is defined as a chronologically-ordered stack.

The Coles Notes version is that the attribution tag is a way to show where a playlist came from in the event you copy it and modify it for your own purposes. If it’s a copy of a copy there are two attribution elements, if it’s a copy of a copy of a copy there are three and so forth. This is what he calls “stackable”, each ancestor is “stacked” creating a path back through time where each ancestor is accessible from the current playlist.

It’s a cool concept and suits its purpose very well. They intend for the list to grow until it’s about 10 items long at which point they advocate dropping the oldest tags to prevent it from becoming overly cumbersome.

This is where it diverges from our needs. In the context of XSPF it serves a kind of genealogy, the older the attribution, the less likely it is to have a significant resemblance to the current list. So the most recent attributions are the most relevant. With commercial attribution we encounter a different model. The two most important links in the chain are the most recent link, where you got it from, and the *oldest* link, the original grand daddy and copyright holder. We can’t chop the roots.

To manage this we imagined two tags, one pertaining to the most recent attribution, and one pointing to the original. It’s possible to follow the chain by following the most recent attribution link until you reach the original, or at any point you can leap straight to the original.

But what I really like about the stacking is that it strengthens the chain. With just one link as soon as you hit a broken link, your chain is broken, but with multiple links back there’s more redundancy and a better chance of keeping the chain intact. So perhaps we can do both; stack the inheritance, but always keep a link to the original.