ABOUT THE FILM

In RiP: A remix manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.

www3.nfb.ca

Looks very interesting and I’d love to see it when it’s available.  In keeping with the spirit of the film, remixes are encouraged and the film will evolve from it’s “beta” presentation at Festival du Nouveau Cinéma with the inclusion of user-submitted remixes.  The film explores the ideas around copyright clashing with digital culture guided by its protagonist, Girl Talk.  Girl Talk, is a musician who’s (in)famous for using numerous unauthorized samples in his music.

The nature of media is changing. Recently Ian Rogers made the following statement to the Recording Academy:

GRAMMY Northwest MusicTech Summit Keynote by Ian Rogers

the media space have changed and you shouldn’t expect the winners or even the definition of winning to stay constant

topspinmedia.com

This is the the truth. New ways of engaging with media are here, and the business models that evolve from this revolution in media consumption will fundamentally change the media industry’s landscape.

• attributionCopied: Indicates that the described resource is a copy of the related resource from which it is derived. See also: The need for an attribution trail.
• attributionModified: Indicates that the described resource is a modified copy of the related resource from which it is derived.
• attributionDerived: Indicates that the described resource is a derivative work of the related resource from which it is derived. See also: Reusing Content: Derived Work vs Modified Work

These vocabularies let us specify how various copies of media spread throughout the Web are related to each other. The vocabulary document is here: http://playtheweb.org/rdf/

Then we can use the Dublin Core terms to fill out the information a little more broadly.  Specifically title, identifier, date and license.  More detail could be added, but those are the baseline needs.

This is a bit barebones at the moment. It certainly can be improved. I’ve been thinking that it might be better to use a single term to denote a relationship and another set of triples to describe the kinds of relationships rather than having a separate relationship term for every type.

There also needs to be more work on how to denote an attribution trail, especially when an object is a mash-up from multiple sources.

One of the sessions I attended was by Jordan Behan and Joe Solomon: “Marketers For A Cause“.  After a lightening exercise in guerilla democracy we selected three causes to brainstorm around.  Of these I was most moved by Megan Cole’s pitch for Hands Up For Africa - read more about the inspiring story here.  BarCamp sessions are short and by the time we were all in a circle talking ideas we had about 12 minutes left to brainstorm.  I was very impressed by the number of ideas and the breadth of knowledge that was in the room.  One small part of what emerged was a better way to donate, below is the widget.  It’s great to see the Web being leveraged for social good.

Ok, on to more traditional subject matters…

Seamus’s and my presentation went very well.  We wanted lots of input from the other people attending the session and we were not disappointed.  Semantic Web is a hot topic and there were lots of ideas.

We met some fascinating people.  Jim Pick was there to talk about rdfvancouver.org and building a Vancouver-based community around Semantic Web, David Orchard was there - super smart guy, Steve Dickinson came up from New Zealand with some really compelling visualisation technology developed by his company, Centruflow.  Peter Van Garderen made some of the most salient and insightful points of the entire RDF portion of BarCamp, what a pleasure to have him in the room.

This is only a fraction of the people we met of course but I couldn’t list everyone if I wanted to.  All very positive stuff.  Thanks everyone!

I’ve posted a few links relevant to the session at:
http://barcamp.org/barcampvancouver2008-media_reuse_and_the_semantic_web

RDFa is pretty easy to understand when you’re looking at marked up content.  Here’s an example of a vcard done up RDFa-style from w3.org:

<p class="contactinfo" about="http://example.org/staff/jo"
   xmlns:contact="http://www.w3.org/2001/vcard-rdf/3.0#">
  <span property="contact:fn">
    Jo Smith
  </span>.
  <span property="contact:title">
    Web hacker
  </span>
  at
  <a rel="contact:org" href="http://example.org">
    Example.org
  </a>.
  You can contact me
  <a rel="contact:email" href="mailto:jo@example.org">
    via email
  </a>.
</p>

Ok, that’s clear enough.  The namespace thing might be a little tricky until it’s explained but even without getting that part… “contact:fn” ok probably full name, “contact:title” job title, “contact:org” organisation… you get the idea.

Manu Sporny put together a RDFa video tutorial which is great introduction to RDFa.  It introduces triples and the basics of using vocabularies which really are the foundation of RDFa.

Ok, cool.  I start looking at ccREL and I’m seeing all kinds of connections to what we’re doing.  “Why don’t we just use ccREL?”  I’m thinking.  They’re missing a few things we want to include, namely terms to describe the attribution trail so I start digging around Dublin Core and end up at the DCMI Metadata Terms.  Ok, why didn’t Creative Commons use this?  There’s lots we can use in the DCMI Metadata Terms too but I’m still not seeing anything for maintaining attribution trails in the way we’ve discussed but at least we’ve found a Dublin Core Vocabulary that meets 90% of our needs.

So onto write a RDFa vocabulary document to define the terms we need.  Oh look! w3.org even has a chapter titled “3.1 Creating a Custom Vocabulary and Using Compact URIs“.  Here’s what they say about creating a custom vocabulary:

Some structured-data concepts, such as dc:title, dc:date, etc. can be clearly reused from the Dublin Core vocabulary, but other concepts, such as lens settings, camera model, and other photographer parameters, may need to be defined from scratch. For this purpose, Shutr defines a vocabulary namespace URI:

http://shutr.net/vocab/1.0/

Shutr can then publish terms such as http://shutr.net/vocab/1.0/takenWithCamera, http://shutr.net/vocab/1.0/aperture, etc.

Sorry, how exactly does that work?  No links, no examples, and hardly even the slightest hint of how to accomplish what’s in the bleeding chapter title!  This is where RDFa fails to mitigate the complexity of RDF.  Or perhaps they’re just failing to provide documentation.  Or perhaps I’m just failing to find it.  To boot, this chapter has been removed from the latest version of that document.  Now creating vocabularies isn’t mentioned at all.

I see this as a big problem for adoption.  To describe the RDFa documentation as daunting is to be generous.  Here’s the document describing the RDFa syntax.  Betcha haven’t seen a scrollbar handle that short for a while.

Now I don’t mean to be overly-critical here.  That document is a monumental achievement and is a fantastic resource serving an important function.  But RDFa needs something aimed at helping people who wish to use the tech without necessarily becoming RDFa gurus.

We came across an email thread at lists.whatwg.org where the possibility of including RDFa in HTML5 is discussed.  It essentially boils down to:

RDFa: include our attributes please!
HTML5 (mainly Ian Hickson): use the existing tags.
RDFa: but we have namespaces and our structured markup will solve all kinds of problems.
HTML5: users won’t implement it correctly anyhow, look at the mess that metadata is right now.

And rinse, and repeat.

Part of me has to agree with Ian Hickson, especially in light of the difficulty I’ve had digesting this format.  Most of the time when I need to learn a new language I’ll hack around with it trying various things.  When I’m doing something wrong I get errors and I can refine my process until I get no errors.  Then I know that at least I’m getting the syntax right and I can build from there.  With RDFa I don’t have that luxury.

I used w3’s validation tool to make sure my markup was well-formed and an RDFa parsor/extractor from http://arc.semsol.org/ to see if RDFa was giving me any love.  This is one parser among many (but not that many) that each give a slightly different result when fed the same markup.

Ideally there is an official, litmus test, if it’s green here it’s green everywhere validation suite that will (at the least):

1. Validate the vocabulary documents and turn them into a human-readable version of what each term means.
2. Validate and parse XHTML/RDFa and extract the RDFa tags so you can see if what you’ve written expresses what you mean.

Without these tools we will see no end of broken and/or poorly implemented RDFa tags.

I have managed to put together the beginnings of a very simple RDFa format that supports the attribution trail we’ve been discussing.  I’ll post that in a subsequent entry.  I’ll be at Vancouver’s BarCamp this weekend discussing this format and the possibilities surrounding it.  Hope to see some of you there.

After it was finished I spoke with Evan Goer (who co-presented the session along with Paul Tarjan) about what we were doing around this licensing and attribution microformat.  Will SearchMonkey support this microformat? Certainly, just as soon as it’s accepted into microformats.org and achieves a critical mass of popularity, but if it’s RDFa it’s supported already.

Free Lunch

And herein lies a compelling case for RDFa.  If another service implements an RDFa parser anyone publishing in RDFa is immediately visible to that service.  This is the kind of interoperability that microformats lack.  Microformats are little islands of ideas united into a federation by their consistent approach to markup.  But their consistencies don’t yield automatic discovery of unknown microformats.  Each one needs to be implemented and supported independently of the rest.  Put another way, microformats are less of a standard than a bunch of mini-standards.

So we can yell from hilltops about a given microformat all we like but we’re one voice among many hilltops; the Internet is a loud place.  The RDFa standard allows us to automatically describe a format by putting it into a namespace and immediately join the party.  Yay RDFa!

The Catch

There had to be one, didn’t there?  A format aimed at facilitating media reuse on the Web has to travel well.  The Web is still by-and-large HTML.  RDFa is XML.  Doh!  What does that mean?  It means that putting RDFa tags into HTML pages will “break” them.  I quote “break” because it won’t break them in the sense that matters to most people.  Everything will look fine, all the major browsers will parse and display the content without complaint, but technically we would be violating the HTML specification and it will no longer validate correctly.  No namespaces in HTML.  Is this really a problem or am I just being pedantic?  I have to admit, I’m a little uneasy about using a standard that will break people’s validation.  XHTML is fine with RDFa of course and we should all be using it but we’re not there yet.

Another aspect of travelling well however is allowing the automatic interoperability that RDFa provides.  Ben Adida (co-editor and task-force chair for RDFa) has called it “Bridging the clickable and data webs”, and this concept is really at the heart of media reuse.  We need to talk to each other people!  And as we generally can’t agree on what to say, let’s agree on how to say it.

Survivor

Will RDFa’s incompatability with HTML sink it?  Actually, I think it will be the other way around.  More and more the Web is about connecting services and sharing data.  Providing namespaces to describe the many, many disparate data models is critical to enabling that.  OAuth, OpenSocial, Yahoo’s various APIs, it’s all moving that way and we all need help understanding what we’re talking about.  Perhaps I’m wrong with RDFa and HTML specifically but in the larger picture extensible, automatically discoverable (dare I say viral?) concepts will outlive brittle and inflexible ones.  It’s evolution folks and right now my money’s on RDFa.

Microformats and RDFa

While researching Microformats and RDFa I came across a very consice post by Mike Birbeck addressing this issue directly.  Given he’s a co-designer of RDFa it’s unsurprising that he comes down on his home team’s side but I think his points are salient.  Evan Prodromou has weighed in on the microformats vs. RDFa issue too.  He feels that the two formats are quite close and could be bridged with little effort.  What do you think?  If Ben Adida and Tantek Çelik got in a room together do you think they would emerge with a unified format? I’m not so sure.  I agree that they look very similar on the surface but the philosophies behind them are very different.  Mind you, Evan’s post is a little dated now (May 29, 2006) and RDFa has made a lot of progress in the meantime, I wonder if he still feels the same way.

I should mention that I found both of those links on Mike Linksvayer’s “Microformats are Worse” post where by “worse” he means “better”, or at least “simpler”.  Here’s a little worse is better primer.  The simplicity of microformats is compelling but it comes at a cost of centralized control and limited extensibility.  Sure RDFa is a little more complicated but the range of application becomes so much larger as a result.  I think the increased complexity is worth it.

I’m going to see what some of the ideas we’ve been discussing here would look like in an RDFa format.  Watch for a post about that soon.

[Edit]
Here’s another article by Manu Sporny talking about the limitations of Microformats due to their lack of namespaces.  He feels that RDFa is the inevitable successor to Microformats, and I’m starting to agree.

Presently, all the blogs I’ve looked at (I readily concede there are blogs that I have not looked at ) which assign a license to their content do it on a page or global level.However, in a world where content reuse is the norm, any given web page or web site is likely a mash-up of content, or using content with multiple authors, carrying varied licenses. As such the published license is actually inaccurate.

For example,

Previously I pointed out the excellently attributed blog by Miss 604. In it she reuses the following image:

Rebecca, publishes her blog under the Creative Commons 2.5 license. However, the image she reused is published under the Creative Commons 2.0 license. To regular Joes and Janes this really is not a big deal, we can read the attribution for the image. Then we can go check out the actual source and then find the associated license for that content. That’s what ethical people reading her blog would do if they wanted to reuse the image by Squeaky Marmot

But, licensing metadata on a website should be more than human readable. We want the license to be machine readable. This way we (by that I mean the global “we”) can develop systems that search for, discover, and reuse content with the appropriate licenses. If we do not wrap each object, with an appropriate license not only is publishing a work potential misleading, it makes systems designed for content reuse very difficult to develop.

That’s why the proposed microformat drafted by Play The Web dot org is contained by a set of classes. What defines those and what they are called is still to be determined. This way Rebecca can clearly re-publish the image under Creative Commons 2.0, while keeping her original content under 2.5.

Seamus and Rob will be at Yahoo! Hackday this weekend to talk about this idea and how a simple systems could be developed to support the format and how it could integrate into a number of publishing and authoring tools.

</geek alert>

With that in mind here’s some preliminary thinking on a licensing and attribution format.

The primary goals here are:

1. Enable “scoping” so particular pieces of media can be tagged independently of one another.
2. Specify the media as a copy, derivative work or modified work.
3. Use existing microformats where possible.
4. KISS - Life is complicated enough.

This is a collaborative process, and our thinking will likely change as we go through the process, so please treat this all as pre-beta conversation-fodder.

Without further ado, here’s a first draft:

<!– Scope.
Certain tags will scope the relevant tags to everything within it. Allows us to create license blocks that apply to only a portion of a page rather than all-or-nothing. We need to decide how to determine which tags will define a block.
–>
<div class=”[container class]“>

<!– Content.
This can be anything, including nested scope blocks. The most specific block will determine how media is licensed, attributed, etc.
–>
<span>
<img src=”http://example.com/some_media.jpg” />
</span>

<!– Creator.
Use hCard? http://microformats.org/wiki/hCard
–>
<span class=”creator vcard”>
<a class=”url fn” href=”http://example.com/”>Joe Example</a>
</span>

<!– License.
Like http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-license but bound by the scope.
–>
<a rel=”license” href=”[link to license]“>[license description]</a>

<!– Copied source. - media source
Where (URL-wise) this media came from. Links to the relevant URL. Multiple copied-source tags may be specified (or “stacked” - http://playtheweb.org/2008/08/26/the-long-trail/) to show a longer trial.
–>
<a rel=”copied-source” href=”[link to original page]” target=”_blank” />

<!– Original Source. - media source
Where (URL-wise) this media *ulitmately* came from. Links to the relevant URL. There will likely need to be some kind of dispute resolution process around this.
–>
<a rel=”source” href=”[link to original page]” target=”_blank” />

<!– Derivative source. - media source
Marks the media as a derivative work and links to the original work(s). A media item may have many derivative sources.
–>
<a rel=”derivative-source” href=”[link to original media]” />

<!– Modified source. - media source
Marks the media as a modified work (media that is changed but not necessarily changed enough to qualify as a derivative work) and links to the original work.
—>
<a rel=”modified-source” href=”[link to original media]” />

</div>

Many of those tags I’ve described as a “media source” and we need to account for sources referencing things other than URLs.  Here’s some - also very preliminary - thinking on what could comprise a media source.

If it’s an URL use a A tag with a relevant media source type in the rel attribute(origin, attribution, etc.)

<a rel=”source” href=”http://example.com”>[text]</a>

If it’s a person or a company, use hCard and overload the class with the media source type.

<span class=”source hcard”>
<a class=”url fn” href=”http://example.com/”>Joe Example</a>
</span>

If it’s a publication use citation?  http://microformats.org/wiki/citation Overload as with hCard.

<span class=”source citation”>
<span class=”periodical”>
<span class=”author firstauthor”>
<span class=”family-name”>Roth</span>,
<span class=”given-name”>Mathew</span>
</span>
(<span class=”year”>2008</span>):
„<span class=”article”>Using semantic HTML in scientific work</span>.“
P. <span class=”part”>1</span>; P. <span class=”part”>2</span>.
In:
<span class=”title”>The Computational Linguist</span>.
<span class=”subseries”>Development of the Semantic Web</span>.
<span class=”volume”>2</span>
(<span class=”ctime”>2008</span>)
No. <span class=”number”>16</span>,
Pp. <span class=”pagerange”>124–131</span>
(Access: <span class=”atime”><abbr title=”20080714T1612+0200″>14.07.2008 16:12 CEST</abbr></span>)
<span class=”url”>http://www.example.com/web/address/1234.pdf</span>
</span>
</span>

I haven’t addressed videos, film, radio and doubtlessly a whole host of others.

So the floor is open and we’re keen to hear your ideas.  Does this meet your needs for licensing and attribution on the Internet?  What’s missing?  Which parts are working and which parts are broken?

Ubiquity is an experiment two parts. It’s both an interface and a development platform. Ubiquity 0.1 focuses on the platform aspects, while beginning to explore language-driven methods of controlling the browser.

There is some really deep thinking on the entire user experience of USING the Web in everyday life. His post is like a massive “whack on the side of the head”. Particularly, when he put a mirror up to the fundamental tools on the Net.

Being relatively new to the Mozilla world, we found it difficult and time-consuming to write extensions to Firefox [ed. Or any other browser]. There is something largely last-decade about requiring restarts to add a new feature to your browsing experience. It’s ironic that the entire Web is on a push model, yet the browser—the most fundamental tool of interacting with the Web—is on a pull model.

In essence this is what his experiment is trying to tackle; he is trying to hook together millions of Web services and their content for regular users. Ubiquity’s goal is to do this without requiring a browser plug-in coder or cumbersome user installs.

Ubiquity treats extending the browser like writing websites. It’s an experiment in lowering the barrier to [fundamental] enhancing the browsing experiment.

This is certainly a big idea for Web Play, and probably one of the clearest examples illustrating the need for microformats and particularly one for content attribution

.

It’s the thinking behind this that is so important. Well done!

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:

1. The Copying
2. 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.

What do you think?  Is this a good way to attribute media’s sources as it travels through the Internet?

When searching for an example of proper attribution, I had to go no further than Miss 604’s blog, aka Rebecca Bollwitt. She often reuses other people’s photos in her popular blog, all of which are meticulously attributed and linked.

(Note: she has even created a screencast tutorial on how she gets captions under her photos in order to give proper attribution. You should check it out. Many of us want to do the right thing, but we are often too lazy or sloppy when using other people’s content. There’s really no excuse for not doing this.)

However, what happens when I want to reuse content I found on Rebecca’s blog, that is coming from someone else. I want to reuse the picture of Roger Bannister’s statue that Rebecca reused. Now, I could simply repost the picture from Squeaky Marmot and provide proper attribution.

Squeaky Marmot on Flickr

That would satisfy my legal and ethical requirement, but is it good etiquette? I didn’t find the picture on Squeaky Marmot’s Flickr account. I was reading Rebecca’s bog, and I never would have found Squeaky Marmot’s picture otherwise.

I think simply reposting the picture without some sort of additional attribution to Miss604.com loses vital information. Neither Squeaky Marmot nor Rebecca know that I found the picture through reading the Miss 604 blog. Both of those people have a vested interest in knowing how I found the picture. So, I should give attribution to both Miss 604 and Squeaky Marmot as per below.

I’m now kind of concerned with what to call “Attribution”. In the Creative Commons attribution is a legal term, but what I really want to relate is:

1. From where did I find the content: Miss 604’s blog. (The Copied Source)
2. From where did the original content come from: Squeaky Marmot (The Original Source or at least the source Miss 604 found)

Do you reuse content? Do others reuse your content? If so, what do you think? How would you like to see the “attribution”?