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CREATIVE COMMONS RELEASES LIBLICENSE FOR SIMPLE TECHNICAL LICENSING
INTEGRATION
San Francisco, CA - July 30, 2007 - Today, Creative Commons published
the first public release of its desktop licensing library, Liblicense,
featuring desktop integration. When content authors grant permission
for re-use of their work, Liblicense provides software developers with
the ability to easily discover and display those permissions to a user.
Liblicense also offers authors the ability to embed those permissions
in a standard way in files.
Generally, copyright law applies automatically upon fixation of a creative
work to tangible form, and people must get explicit permission from the
copyright owner before they are allowed to re-use or change the work.
To allow collaboration, many authors choose to stamp their work with
content licenses allowing some forms of re-use.
On the World-Wide Web, authors frequently publish license information in
a web page shown to users before they download the actual work. "Once off
of the web, the files are on their own. When away from the context of the
creator's website, information about the permissions is lost. When would
this all change? When will a license be as ubiquitous as a modification
timestamp?" asks Scott Shawcroft, one of the developers of Liblicense.
Developed by Scott Shawcroft, Jason Kivlighn, Jon Phillips and Nathan
Yergler, Liblicense 0.3 is the first small step towards universal license
tracking on the desktop. Liblicense can show users the license of a file
and enable them to license new files or modify the license on old files.
By embedding information about many licenses into the software package,
liblicense allows authors to embed concise license names while users
can see a full name and description.
Liblicense does not and is never intended to technologically restrict the
ability of users to use their computers or the content that is stored
on those computers. It serves to inform rather than enforce. This is
especially important because copyright law has a broad exception category
called "fair use" that allows for some use of a work without permission,
and all of the licenses supported by Liblicense do not restrict those
fair uses.
There are many interesting applications which have yet to be explored. As
one example, Creative Commons plans on integrating liblicense with Sugar,
the user interface library used by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project.
They are also considering use in applications such as music players, web
feed readers, desktop publishing programs, and text editors. "Imagine
finding a song you love using Amarok and finding out you can share it with
your friends. Or imagine finding a brilliant poem on a blog through
Liferea you can base a video or song off of," says Shawcroft.
Additionally, in the future, Creative Commons hopes that Liblicense will
support embedding license information into all of the file types used
on the desktop. While this goal is technically challenging, steps must
first be made in creating standardized ways of embedding license data
in some file types.
For more information visit
http://www.creativecommons.org/project/Liblicense, join the developers
on irc.freenode.net/#cc or email them on cc-devel@lists.ibiblio.org.
Liblicense is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/cctools under
the CC-GNU-LGPL, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/LGPL/2.1/.
About Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a not-for-profit organization, founded in 2001, that
promotes the creative re-use of intellectual and artistic works-whether
owned or in the public domain. Creative Commons licenses provide a
flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and
educators that build upon the "all rights reserved" concept of traditional
copyright to offer a voluntary "some rights reserved" approach. It is
sustained by the generous support of various organizations including
the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Omidyar Network, the
Hewlett Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation as well as members
of the public. For general information, visit http://creativecommons.org.
Press Contact
Nathan Yergler
Chief Technical Officer
Creative Commons
(415) 369 - 8487
nathan@creativecommons.org
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