Digital Rights Description

By Shannon Cochran

December 23, 2002

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The Creative Commons copyright licenses introduced last week—giving authors a range of new legal tools with which to make their works free for sharing or modification—are perhaps notable as a political sally against the movie and music industries' ever-tightening stranglehold on the public domain. But the new licenses are even more interesting as an important foray into that wide and hazy realm known as the Semantic Web.

Creative Commons is backed by the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, and chaired by Internet crusader Lawrence Lessig—the lawyer who argued before the Supreme Court that repeated copyright extensions violate the Constitution. The group's position is one of open advocacy. "We adopt this strategy now because there's an urgency to this debate," says Lessig. "Over time, the space of free expression has shrunk." By giving authors simple tools with which they may explicitly approve file-swapping or the creation of new content based on their works, Creative Commons hopes to take some of the sting out of laws like the DMCA.

But the really interesting part is that the licenses are designed to be machine-readable. By specifying a few lines of RDF/XML metadata such as:

<rdf:RDF xmlns="http://web.resource.org/cc/"
    xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
<license rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/1.0" />
    <requires rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Attribution" />
    <permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/DerivativeWorks" />
    <permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Reproduction" />
    <permits rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Distribution" />
    <requires rdf:resource="http://web.resource.org/cc/Notice" />
</License>
</rdf:RDF>

authors can indicate that (in this case) anybody is free to copy, distribute, display, or perform the given work, but that credit must always be given to the original author.

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