visibility of European Research (goal number two). They could, as readers of scientific communication, access all the full-text materials from these 51 repositories through a few mouse clicks: this way, DRIVER tried to make the researchers-as-authors enthusiastic to contribute to the collections of OA materials. Because this was only a test-bed phase, usability studies were carried out in order to optimize the services and benefits for researchers in DRIVER II.16 The long-term goal of extending the network and building more services on top of the first content base fits neatly into the third goal of i2010: improving quality of life (by facilitating scientific progress) and better public services (by opening up the outputs of publicly-funded research results).

On the political side, the strategy of DRIVER was to advocate the establishment of more OA repositories throughout Europe, and to inform the scientific and greater community of the benefits of OA. An informative and interactive website has been created for that goal, and support services for repository managers and scientific authors were built on this website.17 On a higher level, a few DRIVER partners co-initiated the "Petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results", which was handed over to Janosz Potoçnik, the European Commissioner for Research.18 The petition received over 12,000 signatures from institutions, research funders, individuals and even publishers in no more than two weeks. The counter now stands at 27,280 signatories. This proved that the academic community is ready and willing to conform to an OA mandate by the EC. Indeed, the EC has now implemented an OA mandate for all resulting publications of research projects under FP7. Nevertheless, this mandate is quite limited and leaves a lot of room for non-compliance.19 The European Research Council, another major European research fund, has set the example and released a mandate in December 2007.20 DRIVER keeps lobbying on a high level in order to convince the EC of the importance of a mandate for Europe, whilst extending the network of European repositories into a Confederation with international bonds (see 2.2.1). DRIVER also issued technical guidelines for repository managers

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16 Karen Van Godtsenhoven and Maurits Van der Graaf, "Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research", DRIVER Usability Assessment Report (2007), available at http://www.driver-support.eu/documents/DRIVER\_usability\_study\_Gent.pdf.

17 See www.driver-support.eu.

18 http://www.ec-petition.eu.

19 See the section "Immediate policy revisions for greater openness" at http://www. openaire.eu/en/component/content/article/223-seizing-the-opportunity-for-openaccess-to-european-research-ghent-declaration-published.

20 See http://erc.europa.eu/pdf/ScC\_Guidelines\_Open\_Access\_revised\_Dec07\_FINAL.pdf.

and three OA books concerning practical and political issues for repository managers, university administrators and scientific researchers.

The Belgian DRIVER partner, the University Library of Ghent, established a national network of institutional and subject-based repository managers, supported by a national community website with intranet and mailing lists.21 This group of content providers met every two or three months, but very soon it appeared that, although the repository managers (often librarians) were very enthusiastic about the OA cause, their management did not allocate enough resources to the establishment and maintenance of the repository (the most pressing problem was man-hours, not so much the servers or technologies). In order to make the repositories more of a priority for university administrations, DRIVER lobbied with the university librarians and rectors by means of fact sheets and information sessions, until all-but-one (14 out of 15) university rectors agreed to officially sign the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Research in the Sciences and Humanities during a national conference.22 The two Ministers of Research and Education from Flanders and the French Community also agreed to sign the Declaration, and the two main research funders (FWO and FNRS) had already signed it before. This was a major turning point for the Belgian Open Access landscape: mainly in a strategic sense, since it led to two OA mandates: one by the FWO and one by the University of Liège.23 The rector of Liège, Bernard Rentier, gave an inspiring speech at the national conference and became a very vehement OA advocate. He founded the European Open Access initiative for university rectors: Europenscholarship.24 Over the course of one year, Belgium turned from a blind spot in terms of OA and repositories, into a country bustling with activity and enthusiasm. Through the distributed responsibilities and difficulties in the Belgian political landscape, there is not one administration responsible for research which could provide a national network like HAL in France and DAREnet in the Netherlands, but through the goodwill of many involved parties, the national repository community is still extending and getting closer to becoming a real network of content providers.

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21 More information about the University Library of Ghent can be found at http://lib.ugent. be, and the community website is at www.driver-repository.be.

22 See http://www.driver-repository.be/content1.aspx?PageId=162.

23 See for example http://www.fwo.be.

24 See Bernard Rentier's blog: http://recteur.blogs.ulg.ac.be.

### 2.2 Plans for DRIVER II

The follow-up project of DRIVER, DRIVER II, financed under DG Research of the EC, sets out to take the accomplishments of DRIVER I a few steps further. The project goals are being extended in many key ways.

This four-fold extension of the DRIVER vision and ambitions fits into the EC's vision of the "European Research Area":27 a unified, strong European research community, which can compete with greater powers such as the US or China. This way, DRIVER II creates an economic advantage for Europe: because it is the only infrastructure in its kind, Europe is one step ahead in bringing together its scientific resources in a unified way.

The Belgian activities with repository managers and OA advocacy continue in DRIVER II, and Ghent University Library will also be more involved in the technical work-packages of DRIVER II, with technical tests throughout the country. A distributed project like DRIVER in a divided country like Belgium is no sinecure, but the latest developments have been favourable: many subject-based repository managers have

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25 See http://www.driver-repository.eu/Summit1/DRIVER\_Summit\_report\_Jan08.pdf.

26 See http://www.driver-repository.eu/D-NET\_release.

27 See http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/e-infrastructure/home\_en.html.

joined the Belgian DRIVER community, and with the new release of the D-NET software package it will be possible to build a national network of repositories. The only things lacking are political and therefore financial support for the infrastructure (servers and staff), without which a long-term vision cannot be accomplished.

Both DRIVER I and II fit into the EC's vision of an open, inclusive and integrated knowledge society for Europe, with the socio-economic benefits being the establishment of a unified, robust, state-of-the-art scientific e-infrastructure (with economical advantage for Europe as a continent because of increased research impact), and the opening up of a qualitative science commons to all researchers and readers worldwide (social benefit: developing countries are no longer cut off from vital information, and the greater professional public—for example a specialized doctor or lawyer—can now also freely access the latest evolutions in their field).

The benefits of an open knowledge society are multiple and both benefits (social and economic) have a positive effect on each other: the more a country invests in R&D and innovation, the more it reaps financial rewards, which can in turn provide a better education system resulting in a stronger economy. The DRIVER projects also contribute to the vision of a worldwide open knowledge society by establishing contacts with other repository networks and exchanging best practices with developing nations and continents. The DRIVER and DRIVER II projects have now evolved into OpenAIRE,28 a project that takes OA a step further and focuses on the distribution and openness of research data. The aim is for the implemented research infrastructures from DRIVER to become fully-grown Open Access scientific information networks.

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28 See http://www.openaire.eu.

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# 10. CC REL: The Creative Commons Rights Expression Language

*Hal Abelson, Ben Adida, Mike Linksvayer and Nathan Yergler*

This chapter introduces the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (CC REL), the standard recommended by Creative Commons (CC) for machine-readable expression of copyright licensing terms and related information.1 CC REL and its description in this contribution supersede all previous CC recommendations for expressing licensing metadata. Like CC's previous recommendation, CC REL is based on the World Wide Web Consortium's Resource Description Framework (RDF).2 Compared to the previous recommendation, CC REL is intended to be both

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1 This chapter contains stylistic, formatting, and minor updates of "ccREL: The Creative Commons Rights Expression Language", a W3C Member Submission of 1 May 2008 by the authors, available at http://www.w3.org/Submission/ccREL. The authors wish to credit Neeru Paharia, past Executive Director of Creative Commons, for the "free-floating" content accountability architecture, Manu Sporny, CEO of Bitmunk, for the Creative Commons Operator code, and Aaron Swartz for the original Creative Commons RDF data model and metadata strategy. More broadly, the authors wish to acknowledge the work of a number of W3C groups, in particular all members of the RDF-in-HTML task force (Mark Birbeck, Jeremy Carroll, Michael Hausenblas, Shane McCarron, Steven Pemberton and Elias Torres), the Semantic Web Deployment Working Group chaired by Guus Schreiber and David Wood, and the tireless W3C staff without whom there would be no RDFa, GRDDL, or RDF, and thus no CC REL: Eric Miller, Ralph Swick, Ivan Herman and Dan Connolly.

2 RDF is a language for representing information about resources in the World Wide Web. We provide a short primer in this paper. Also, see the Web Consortium's RDF website at http://www.w3.org/RDF.

easier for content creators and publishers to provide, and more convenient for user communities and tool builders to consume, extend and redistribute.3

Formally, CC REL is specified in an abstract syntax-free way, as an extensible set of properties to be associated with a licensed document. Publishers have wide discretion in their choice of syntax, so long as the process for extracting the properties is discoverable and tool builders can retrieve the properties of CC REL-compliant webpages or embedded documents. We also recommend specific concrete "default" syntaxes and embedding schemes for content creators and publishers who want to use CC licenses without needing to be concerned about extraction mechanisms. The default schemes are RDFa for HTML webpages and resources referenced therein, and XMP for stand-alone media.4

For example, using this new recommendation, an author can express CC-structured data in an HTML page using the following simple markup:

```
<div about="http://lessig.org/blog/" xmlns:cc="http://
creativecommons.org/ns#">
 This page, by
 <a property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL"
 href="http://lessig.org/">
 Lawrence Lessig
 </a>,
 is licensed under a
 <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses
 /by/3.0/">
 Creative Commons Attribution License
 </a>.
</div>
```
From this markup, tools can easily and reliably determine that http://lessig. org/blog is licensed under a CC Attribution License, v3.0, where attribution should be given to "Lawrence Lessig" at the URL http://lessig.org.

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3 By "publisher" we mean anyone who places CC-licensed material on the Internet. By "tool builders" we mean people who write applications that are aware of the license information. Example tools might be search programs that filter their results based on specific types of licenses, or user interfaces that display license information in particular ways.

4 RDFa is an emerging collection of attributes and processing rules for extending XHTML to support RDF. See the W3C Working Draft "RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing" at http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-syntax. The "RDFa Primer: Embedding Structured Data in Web Pages", may be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer. RDF/XML, described briefly below, is a method for expressing RDF in XML syntax. See "RDF/ XML Syntax Specification (Revised)," W3C Recommendation 10 February 2004 at http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax-grammar. XMP (Extended Metadata Platform) is a labeling technology developed by Adobe, for embedding constrained RDF/XML within documents. See http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp.

This chapter explains the design rationale for these recommendations and illustrates some specific applications we expect CC REL to support. We begin with a review of the original 2002 recommendation for CC metadata and we explain why, as CC has grown, we have come to regard this as inadequate. We then introduce CC REL in the syntax-free model: as a vocabulary of properties. Next, we describe the recommended concrete syntaxes. We also explain how other frameworks, such as microformats, can be made CC REL compliant. Finally, we discuss specific use cases and the types of tools we hope to see built to take advantage of CC REL.

# **1. Background on Creative Commons recommendations**

Creative Commons was publicly launched in December 2002, but its genesis traces to the summer of 2000 and discussions about how to promote a reasonable and flexible copyright regime for the Internet in an environment where copyright had become unreasonable and inflexible. There was no standard legal means for creators to grant limited rights to the public for online material, and obtaining rights often required difficult searches to identify rights-holders and burdensome transaction costs to negotiate permissions. As digital networks dramatically lowered other costs and engendered new opportunities for producing, consuming, and reusing content, the inflexibility and costs of licensing became comparatively more onerous.

Over the following year, CC's founders came to adopt a two-pronged response to this challenge. One prong was legal and social: create widely applicable licenses that permit sharing and reuse with conditions, clearly communicated in human-readable form. The other prong called for leveraging digital networks themselves to make licensed works more reusable and easy to find; that is, to lower search and transaction costs for works whose copyright holders have granted some rights to the public in advance. Core to this technical component is the ability for machines to detect and interpret the licensing terms as automatically as possible. Simple programs should thus be able to answer questions like:

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Equally important is constructing a robust user-machine bridge for publishing and detecting structured licensing information on the Web, and stimulating the emergence of tools that lower the barriers to collaboration and remixing. For example, if a webpage contains multiple images, not all licensed identically, can users easily determine which rights are granted on a particular image? Can they easily extract this image, create derivative works, and distribute them while assigning proper credit to the original author? In other words, is there a clear and usable connection between what the user sees and what the machine parses? CC REL aims to be a standard that implementors can follow in creating tools that make these operations simple.

#### 1.1 Creative Commons and RDF

As early as fall 2001, CC had settled on the approach of creating machine-readable licenses based on the World Wide Web Consortium's then-emerging Resource Description Framework (RDF), part of the W3C Semantic Web Activity.5

The motivation for choosing RDF in 2001, and for continuing to use it now, is strongly connected to the CC vision: promoting scholarly and cultural progress by making it easy for people to share their creations and to collaborate by building on each other's work. In order to lower barriers to collaboration, it is important that the machine expression of licensing information and other metadata be *interoperable*. Interoperability here means not only that different programs can read particular metadata properties, but also that vocabularies—sets of related properties—can evolve and be extended. This should be possible in such a way that innovation can proceed in a distributed fashion in different communities—authors, musicians, photographers, cinematographers, biologists, geologists, and so on—so that licensing terms can be devised by local communities for types of works not yet envisioned. It is also important that potential extensions be backward compatible: existing tools should not be disrupted when new properties are added. If possible, existing tools should even be able to handle basic aspects of new properties. This is precisely the kind of "interoperability of meaning" that RDF is designed to support.

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5 The Semantic Web Activity is a large collaborative effort led by the W3C aimed at extending the Web to become a universal medium for data exchange, for programs as well as people. See http://www.w3.org/2001/sw.

#### 1.1.1 RDF triples

RDF is a framework for describing entities on the Web. It provides exceptionally strong support for interoperability and extensibility. All entities in RDF are named using a simple, distributed, globally addressable scheme already well known to Web users: the URL, and its generalisation the URI.6

For example, Lawrence Lessig's blog, a document identified by its URL http://lessig.org/blog, is licensed under the CC Attribution license. That license is also a document, identified by its own URL http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0. The property of "being licensed under", which we will call "license" can *itself* be considered a Web object and identified by a URL. This URL is http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/ vocab#license, which refers to a webpage that contains information describing the "license" property. This particular webpage, maintained by the Web Consortium, is the reference document that describes the vocabulary.7

Instantiating properties as URLs enables anyone to use those properties to formulate descriptions, or to discover detailed information about an existing property by consulting the page at the URL, or to make new properties available simply by publishing the URLs that describe those properties.

As a case in point, CC originally defined its own "license" property, which it published at http://creativecommons.org/ns#license since no other group had defined in RDF the concept of a copyright license. When the XHTML Working Group introduced its own license property in 2005, we opted to start using their version, rather than maintain our own CC-dependent notion of license. We were then able to declare that http://creativecommons.org/ns#license is equivalent to the new property http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#license, simply by updating the description at http://creativecommons.org/ns#license. Importantly, RDF makes this equivalence interpretable by programs, not just humans, so that "old" RDF license declarations can be automatically interpreted using the new vocabulary.

In general, atomic RDF descriptions are called *triples*. Each triple consists of a *subject*, a *property*, and a *value* for that property of the subject. The triple

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6 The term URI (universal resource identifier) is a generalisation of URL (universal resource locator). While a URL refers in principle to a resource on the Web, a URI can designate anything named with this universal hierarchical naming scheme. This generality is used in CC REL for items such as downloaded media files.

7 The vocabulary is also referenced in http://www.w3.org/2011/rdfa-context/rdfa-1.1.html, which sets default vocabulary prefixes and terms for RDFa.

that describes the license for Lessig's blog could be represented graphically as shown in Figure 1: a point (the subject) labelled with the blog URL; a second point (the value) labelled with the license URL; and an arrow (the property) labelled with the URL that describes the meaning of the term "license", running from the blog to the license. In general, an RDF model, as a collection of triples, can be visualized as a graph of relations among elements, where the edges and vertices are all labelled using URLs.

**Figure 1:** An RDF Triple represented as an edge between two nodes of a graph

<http://lessig.org/blog> xhtml:license <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/> .

### 1.1.2 Expressing RDF as text

Abstract RDF graphs can be expressed textually in various ways. One commonly used notation, RDF/XML, uses XML syntax. In RDF/XML the triple describing the licensing of Lessig's blog is denoted:

```
<rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
 xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#">
 <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://www.lessig.org/blog/">
 <xhtml:license rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/
        licenses/by/3.0/" />
 </rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>
```
One desirable feature of RDF/XML notation is that it is completely self-contained: all identifiers are fully qualified URLs. On the other hand, RDF/XML notation is extremely verbose, making it cumbersome for people to read and write, especially if no shorthand conventions are used. Even this

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simple example (verbose as it is) uses a shorthand mechanism: the second line of the description beginning xmlns:xhtml defines "xhtml:" to be an abbreviation for http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#, thus expressing the license property in its shorter form, xhtml:license, on the fourth line.

Since the introduction of RDF, the Web Consortium has developed more compact alternative syntaxes for RDF graphs. For example the N3 syntax would denote the above triple more concisely:8 <http://lessig.org/blog>

```
<http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml#license>
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/> .
```
We could also rewrite this using a shorthand as in the RDF/XHTML example above, defining: xhtml: as an abbreviation for http://www.w3.org/1999/ xhtml/vocab#:

```
@prefix xhtml: <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#> .
<http://lessig.org/blog/> xhtml:license
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/> .
```
The shorthand does not provide improved compactness or readability if a prefix is only used once as above. In N3, prefixes are typically defined only when they are used more than once, for example to express multiple properties taken from the same vocabulary. In RDF/XML, because of the stricter parsing rules of XML, there is a bit less flexibility: predicates can only be expressed using the shorthand, while subjects can only be expressed using the full URI.

#### 1.2 CC's previous recommendation: RDF/XML in HTML comments

With its first unveiling of machine-readable licenses in 2002, CC recommended that publishers use the RDF/XML syntax to express license properties. The CC website included a Web-based license generator, where publishers could answer a questionnaire to indicate what kind of license they wanted, and the generator then provided RDF/XML text for them to include on their webpages, inside HTML comments:

 XXX

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8 N3 (Notation 3) was designed to be a compact and more readable alternative to RDF/ XML. See http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Notation3.html.

We knew at the time that this was a cumbersome design, but there was little alternative. RDF/XML, despite its verbosity, was the only standard syntax for expressing RDF. Worse, the Web Consortium's Semantic Web Activity was focused on providing organisations with ways to annotate databases for integration into the Web, and it paid scant attention to the issues of intermixing semantic information with visible Web elements. A task force had been formed to address these issues, but there was no W3C standard for including RDF in HTML pages.

One consequence of CC's limited initial design is that, although millions of webpages now include CC licenses and metadata, there is no uniform, extensible way for tool developers to access this metadata, and the tools that do exist rely on ad-hoc techniques for extracting metadata.

Since 2004, CC has been working with the Web Consortium to create more straightforward and less limited methods of embedding RDF in HTML documents. These new methods are now making their way through the W3C standards process. Accordingly, CC no longer recommends using RDF/ XML in HTML comments for specifying licensing information. This chapter supersedes that recommendation. We hope that the new CC REL standard presented in here will result in a more consistent and stable platform for publishers and tool builders to build upon Creative Commons licenses.

#### **2. The CC REL abstract model**

This section describes CC REL, CC's new recommendation for machine-readable licensing information, in its abstract form, i.e., independent of any concrete syntax. As an abstract specification, CC REL consists of a small but extensible set of RDF properties that should be provided with each licensed object. This abstract specification has evolved since the original introduction of CC properties in 2002, but it is worth noting that all first-generation licenses are still correctly interpretable against the new specification, thanks in large part to the extensibility properties of RDF itself.

The abstract model for CC REL distinguishes two classes of properties: *work properties* describe aspects of specific works, including under which license a work is distributed; and *license properties* describe aspects of licenses.

Publishers will normally be concerned only with work properties: this is the only information publishers provide to describe a work's licensing terms. License properties are used by CC itself to define the authoritative specifications of the licenses we offer. Other organisations are free to use

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these components for describing their own licenses. Such licenses, although related to CC licenses, would not themselves be CC licenses nor would they be endorsed necessarily by CC.

#### 2.1 Work Properties

A publisher who wishes to license a work under a CC license must, at a minimum, provide one RDF triple that specifies the value of the work's license property (i.e. the license that governs the work), for example: <http://lessig.org/blog/> xhtml:license <http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/3.0/>.

Although this is the minimum amount of information, CC also encourages publishers to include additional triples giving information about licensed works: the title, the name and URL for assigning attribution, and the document type. An example might be: <http://lessig.org/blog/> dc:title "The Lessig Blog".

```
<http://lessig.org/blog/> cc:attributionName "Larry Lessig" .
<http://lessig.org/blog/> cc:attributionURL <http://lessig.org/> .
<http://lessig.org/blog/> dc:type dcmitype:Text .
```
The specific work properties illustrated here are:

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9 DCMI promotes the widespread adoption of interoperable metadata standards, and maintains a vocabulary of DCMI Metadata Terms. See http://dublincore.org.

10 All current CC licenses require attribution, and give the publisher the option of specifying a URL with attribution information. The cc:attributionURL property is the preferred way to provide this URL in machine-readable form.

dcmitype:Text and dcmitype:MovingImage are part of the DCMI Vocabulary.

Incidentally, the above list of four triples could be alternately expressed using the N3 semicolon convention, which indicates a list of triples that all have the same subject:

```
@prefix dc: < http://purl.org/dc/terms/> .
@prefix cc: <http://creativecommons.org/ns#> .
@prefix dcmitype: <http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/> .
<http://lessig.org/blog/>
 dc:title "The Lessig Blog" ;
 cc:attributionName "Larry Lessig" ;
 cc:attributionURL <http://lessig.org/> ;
 dc:type dcmitype:Text .
```
There are two more Work properties available to publishers of CC material:

• dc:source—indicates the original source of modified work, specified as a URI, for example:

```
<http://randomblog.example.org/modified_lessig_presentation>
dc:source <http://lessig.org/> .
```
• cc:morePermissions—indicates a URL that gives information on additional permissions beyond those specified in the CC license. For example, a document with a CC license that requires attribution, might, under certain circumstances, be usable without attribution. Or a document restricted to non-commercial use could be available for commercial use under certain conditions.

A typical use would then be:

```
<http://randomblog.example.org/insightful_posting>
 cc:morePermissions <http://randomblog.example.org/
attribution_free_licensing> .
```
The information at the designated URL is completely up to the publisher, as are the terms of the associated additional permissions, with one proviso: the additional permissions must be *additional* permissions, i.e., they cannot restrict the rights granted by the CC license. Said another way, any use of the work that is valid without taking the morePermissions property into account, must remain valid after taking morePermissions into account.

This is the current set of CC REL work properties. New properties may be added over time, defined by CC or by others. Observe that CC REL inherits the underlying extensibility of RDF—all that is required to create new properties is to include additional triples that use these. For example,

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a community of photography publishers could agree to use an additional photoResolution property, and this would not disrupt the operation of pre-existing tools, so long as the old properties remain available. We will see below that the concrete syntax (RDFa) recommended by CC for CC REL enjoys this same extensibility property.

Distributed creation of new properties notwithstanding, only CC can include new elements in the cc: namespace, because it controls the defining document at http://creativecommons.org/ns#. The ability to retain this kind of control, without loss of extensibility, is a direct consequence of using RDF.

#### 2.2 License Properties

We now consider properties used for describing licenses. With CC REL, CC does not expect publishers to use these license properties directly, or even to deal with them at all.

In contrast, CC's original metadata recommendation encouraged publishers to provide the license properties with every licensed work. This design was awkward, because once a publisher has already indicated which license governs the work, specifying the license properties in addition is redundant and thus error prone. The CC REL recommendation does away with this duplication and leaves it to CC to provide the license properties.

Tool builders, on the other hand, should take these license properties into account so that they can interpret the particulars of each CC license. The license properties governing a work will typically be found by URL-based discovery. A tool examining a work notices the xhtml:license property and follows the indicated link to a page for the designated license. Those license description pages—the "Creative Commons Deeds"—are maintained by CC, and include the license properties in the CC-recommended concrete syntax (RDFa), as described in section 7.2:

Here are the license properties defined as part of CC REL:

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Importantly, CC does not allow third parties to modify these properties for existing CC licenses. That say that publishers may certainly use these properties to create new licenses of their own, which they should host on their own servers, and not represent as being CC licenses.

The possible values for cc:permits, i.e. the possible permissions granted by a CC license, are:

The possible values for cc:prohibits, i.e. possible prohibitions that modulate permissions (but do not affect permissions granted by copyright law, such as fair use), are:

• cc:CommercialUse—using the work for commercial purposes.

The possible values for cc:requires are:

For example, the Attribution Share-Alike v3.0 Creative Commons license is described as:11 @prefix cc: http://creativecommons.org/ns#.

```
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>
 cc:permits cc:Reproduction ;
cc:permits cc:Distribution ;
```
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11 *Caveat:* The text descriptions of these property values are indicative only. The precise legal interpretations of the properties can be subtle and even jurisdiction dependent. Consult the full CC licenses ("legal code") for the actual legal definitions.

```
cc:permits cc:DerivativeWorks ;
cc:requires cc:Attribution ;
cc:requires cc:ShareAlike ;
cc:requires cc:Notice .
```
As new copyright licenses are introduced, CC expects to add new permissions, requirements, and prohibitions. However, it is unlikely that CC will introduce new license property types beyond permits, requires and prohibits. As a result, tools built to understand these three property types will be able to interpret future licenses, at least by listing the license's permissions, requirements, and prohibitions: thanks to the underlying RDF framework of designating properties by URLs, these tools can easily discover human-readable descriptions of these as-yet-undefined property values.

### **3. Desiderata for concrete CC REL syntaxes**

While the previous examples illustrate CC REL using the RDF/XML and N3 notations, CC REL is meant to be independent of any particular syntax for expressing RDF triples. To create compliant CC REL implementations, publishers need only to arrange that tool builders can extract RDF triples for the relevant CC REL properties—typically only the work properties, since CC provides the license properties—through a discoverable process. We expect that different publishers will do this in different ways, using syntaxes of their choice that take into account the kinds of environments they would like to provide for their users. In each case, however, it is the publisher's responsibility to associate their pages with appropriate extraction mechanisms and to arrange for these mechanisms to be discoverable by tool builders.

CC also recommends concrete CC REL syntaxes that tool builders should recognise by default, so that publishers who do not want to be explicitly concerned with extraction mechanisms have a clear implementation path. These recommended syntaxes—RDFa for HTML webpages, and XMP for free-floating content—are described in the following sections. This section presents the principles underlying our recommendations.

#### 3.1 Principles for HTML

Licensing information for a Web document will be expressed in some form of HTML. What properties would an ideal HTML syntax for expressing CC

THE DIGITAL PUBLIC DOMAIN21March.indd 161 3/26/12 3:22 PM

terms exhibit? Given the use cases we have observed over the past several years, we can call out the following four desiderata.

**Independence and Extensibility:** We cannot know in advance what new kinds of data we will want to integrate with CC licensing data. Currently, we already need to combine CC properties with simple media files (sound, images, videos) and there is a growing interest in providing markup for complex scientific data (biomedical records, experimental results). Therefore, the means of expressing the licensing information in HTML should be extensible: it should enable the reuse of existing data models and the addition of new properties, both by CC and by others. Adding new properties should not require extensive coordination across communities or approval from a central authority. Tools should not suddenly become obsolete when new properties are added, nor when existing properties are applied to new kinds of data sets.

**DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself):** An HTML document often already displays the name of the author and a clickable link to a CC license. Providing machine-readable structure should not require duplicating this data in a separate format. Notably, if the human-clickable link to the license is changed, for example, from v2.5 to v3.0, a machine processing the page should automatically note this change without the publisher having to update another part of the HTML file to keep it "in sync" with the human-readable portion.

**Visual Locality:** An HTML page may contain multiple items, for example a dozen photographs, each with its own structured data and a different license. It should be easy for tools to associate the appropriate structured data with their corresponding visual display.

**Remix Friendliness:** It should be easy to copy an item from one document and paste it into a new document with all appropriate structured data included. In a world where we constantly remix old content to create new content, copy-and-paste, widgets, and sidebars are crucial elements of the remixable Web. As much as possible, CC REL should allow for easy copy-and-paste of data to carry along the appropriate licensing information.

#### 3.2 Desiderata for Free-Floating Content

Some important works are not typically conveyed via HTML. Examples are MP3s, MPEGs, and other media files. The technique for embedding licensing data into these files should achieve the following design principles.

THE DIGITAL PUBLIC DOMAIN21March.indd 162 3/26/12 3:22 PM

**Consistency:** There are many different possible file types. The mechanism for embedding licensing information should be reasonably generic, so that a single tool can read and write the licensing information without requiring awareness of all file types.

**Publisher Accountability:** It can be difficult to provide for accountability of licensing metadata when files are shared in peer-to-peer systems, rather than distributed from a central location. The method for expressing metadata should facilitate providing publisher accountability at least as strong as the accountability of a webpage with a well-defined host and owner.

**Simplicity:** The process of embedding licensing information should require little more than a simple and free program. In particular, though complex publisher accountability approaches involving digital signatures and certificates can be used, they should not be required for the basic use case.

# **4. Including CC REL information in webpages**

Consider the abstract model for CC REL. Here, again, are the triples from the example of Lessig's blog, expressed in N3:12 @prefix xhtml: <http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml#>.

```
@prefix cc: <http://creativecommons.org/ns#> .
<http://lessig.org/blog/> xhtml:license <http://creativecommons.
org/licenses/by/3.0/> .
<http://lessig.org/blog/> cc:attributionName "Lawrence Lessig" .
<http://lessig.org/blog/> cc:attributionURL <http://lessig.org/> .
```
The webpage to which this information refers typically already contains some HTML that describes this same information (redundantly), in human-readable form, for example:

```
<div>
 This page, by
 <a href="http://lessig.org/">
 Lawrence Lessig
 </a>,
 is licensed under a
 <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/">
 Creative Commons Attribution License
 </a>.
</div>
```
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12 It is worth noting that, while the xhtml:license property has long been a part of the CC specification, the cc:attributionName and cc:attributionURL properties are new with CC REL. Under the independence and extensibility principle, the solution we select for embedding CC REL in HTML should allow for such extensions without breaking tools that already know about xhtml:license.

What we would like is a way to quickly augment this HTML with just enough structure to enable the extraction of the RDF triples, using the DRY principle articulated above: the existing markup and links should be used both for human and machine readability.

#### 4.1 RDFa and concrete syntax for Work properties

RDFa was designed by the W3C with CC's input. The design was motivated in part by the principles noted above. Using existing HTML properties and a handful of new ones, RDFa enables a chunk of HTML to express RDF triples, reusing the content wherever possible. For example, the HTML above would be extended by including additional attributes within the HTML anchor tags, as follows:

```
<div about="" xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#">
 This page, by
 <a property="cc:attributionName"
 rel="cc:attributionURL" href="http://lessig.org/">
 Lawrence Lessig
 </a>,
 is licensed under a
 <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/">
 Creative Commons Attribution License
 </a>.
</div>
```
The rules for understanding the meaning of the above markup are:

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The fragment of HTML (within the div) is entirely self-contained (and thus remix-friendly). Its meaning would be preserved if it were copied and pasted into another webpage. The data's structure is local to the data itself: a human looking at the page could easily identify the structured data by pointing to the rendered page and finding the enclosing chunk of HTML. In addition, the clickable links and rendered author names gain semantic meaning without repeating the core data. Finally, as this is embedded RDF, the extensibility and independence properties of RDF vocabularies are automatically inherited: anyone can create a new vocabulary or reuse portions of existing vocabularies.

```
<div about="" typeof="cc:Work"
 xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"
 xmlns:dc=" http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
 align="center">
 <img alt="Creative Commons License"
 src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/3.0/us/88x31.png" />
 <br />
 <span property="dc:title">The Lessig Blog</span>,
 a
 <span rel="dc:type" href="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text">
 collection of texts
 </span>
 by
 <a property="cc:attributionName"
 rel="cc:attributionURL" href="http://lessig.org/">
 Lawrence Lessig
 </a>,<br />
 is licensed under a
 <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/">
 Creative Commons Attribution License
 </a>.<br />
 There are
 <a rel="cc:morePermissions"
 href="http://lessig.org/blog/other-license">
 alternative licensing options
 </a>.
</div>
```
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**Figure 2:** RDFa markup of a Creative Commons license notice, illustrating all the current CC Work properties, including the rendering of this markup in a Web browser

Of course, one can continue to add additional data, both visible and structured. Figure 2 shows a more complex example that includes all work properties currently supported by CC, including how this HTML+RDFa would be rendered on a webpage. Notice how properties can be associated with HTML spans as well as anchors, or in fact with any HTML elements—see the RDFa specification for details.

The examples in this section illustrate how publishers can specify work properties. One can also use RDFa to express license properties. This is what CC does with the license description pages on its own site, as described below in section 7.2.

### 4.2 Microformats

Microformats are a set of simple, open data formats "designed for humans first and machines second" (http://microformats.org/about). They provide domainspecific syntaxes for annotating data in HTML. At the moment, the two widely deployed "compound" microformats annotate contact information (hCard) and calendar events (hCal). Of the "elemental" microformats, those meant to annotate a single data point, the most popular is rel-tag, used to denote a "tag" on an item such as a blog post. Another elemental microformat is rel-license, which is meant to indicate the current page's license and which, conveniently, uses a syntax which overlaps with RDFa: rel="license". Other microformats may, over time, integrate CC properties, for example, when licensing images, videos and other multimedia content.13

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13 See http://microformats.org.

Microformat designers have focused on simplicity and readability, and CC encourages publishers who use microformats to make it easy for tool builders to extract the relevant CC REL triples. Nonetheless, microformats' syntactic simplicity comes at the cost of independence and extensibility, which makes them limited from the CC perspective.

For example, every time a CC license needs to be expressed in a new context—for example, as videos instead of still images—a new microformat and syntax must be designed, and all parsers must then, somehow, become aware of the change. It is also not obvious how one might combine different microformats on a single webpage, given that the syntax rules may differ and even conflict from one microformat to the next.14 Finally, when it comes time to express complex data sets with ever expanding sets of properties (for example, scientific data), microformats do not appear to scale appropriately, given their lack of vocabulary scoping and general inability to mix vocabularies from independently developed sources—the kind of mixing that is enabled by RDF's use of namespaces.

Thus, CC does not recommend any particular microformat syntax for CC REL, but we do recommend a method for ensuring that, when publishers use microformats, tool builders can extract the corresponding CC REL properties: use an appropriate profile URL in the header of the HTML document.15 This profile URL significantly improves the independence and extensibility of microformats by ensuring that the tools can find the appropriate parser code for extracting the CC REL abstract model from the microformat, without having to know about all microformats in advance. One downside is that the microformat syntax then becomes less remix-friendly, with two disparate fragments: one in the head to declare the profile, and one in the body to express the data. Even so, the profile approach is likely good enough for simple data. It is worth noting that this use of a profile URL is already recommended as part of microformats' best practices, though it is unfortunately rarely implemented today in deployed applications.

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14 See http://microformats.org/wiki/grouping-brainstorming for one discussion.

15 Profile URLs indicate that the HTML file can be interpreted according to the rules of that profile. This property has been used by some microformat specifications to indicate, for example, "this page contains the hCard microformat". The property is also used by GRDDL for generic HTML transformations to RDF/XML, although this approach to RDF extraction from HTML is not fully compliant with the principles laid out in this paper: it is difficult to tell which image on a page is CC-licensed when the RDF extraction is achieved via GRDDL.

#### 4.3 GRDDL for XML Documents

Not all documents on the web are HTML: one popular syntax for representing structured data in XML. Given that XML is a machine-readable syntax, often with a strict schema depending on the type of data expressed, not all of the principles we outlined are useful here. In particular, *visual locality* is not relevant when the reader is a machine rather than a human, and *remix-friendliness* does not apply when XML fragments are rarely remixable in the first place, given schema validation. Thus, we focus on *independence and extensibility*, as well as *DRY*.

When publishing CC licensing information inside an XML document, CC recommends exposing a mechanism to extract the CC REL abstract model from the XML, so that CC tools need not know about every possible XML schema ahead of time. The W3C's GRDDL recommendation performs exactly this task by letting publishers specify, either in each XML document or once in an XML schema, an XSL Transformation that extracts RDF/XML from XML.16 Consider, for example, a small extension of the Atom XML publishing schema for news feeds:17 <entry>

```
 <title>Lessig 2.0 - the site</title>
 <link rel="alternate" type="text/html"
 href="http://lessig.org/blog/2007/06/lessig_20_the_site.html" />
 <id>tag:lessig.org,2007:/blog//1.3401</id>
 <published>2007-06-25T19:44:48Z</published>
 <link rel="license" type="text/html"
 href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/" />
 </entry>
```
An appropriate XSL transform can easily process this data to extract the CC REL property that specifies the license:

```
<rdf:RDF about="http://lessig.org/blog/2007/06/lessig_20_the_site.html"
 xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#">
 <cc:license resource="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/" />
</rdf:RDF>
```
Similarly, the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) defines a complex XML schema for library resources.18 These resources may include megabytes

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16 Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages (GRDDL) (http://www. w3.org/TR/grddl) is a W3C recommendation for linking Web documents to algorithms that extract RDF data from the document.

17 Atom License Extension. See http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4946.

18 See http://www.openarchives.org.

of data, sometimes including the entire resource in full text. Using XSLT, one can extract the relevant CC REL information, exactly as above. Using GRDDL, the OAI can specify the XSLT in its XML schema file, so that all OAI documents are automatically transformable to RDF/XML, which immediately conveys CC REL.

#### 4.4 Direct RDF/XML embedding in XML

Because RDF can be expressed using the RDF/XML syntax, one might be tempted to use RDF/XML directly inside an XML document with an appropriate schema definition that enables such direct embedding. This very approach is taken by Scalable Vector Graphics, and there are cases of SVG graphics that include licensing information using directly embedded RDF/XML.19

This approach can be made CC REL-compliant with very little work—a simple GRDDL transform, declared in the XML schema definition, that extracts the RDF/XML and expresses it on its own. Note that, for CC REL compliance, this transform, although simple, is necessary. The reason for its necessity goes to the crux of the CC REL principles: without such a transform provided by each XML schema designer, tools would have to be aware of all the various XML schemas that include RDF/XML in this way. For extensibility and future-proofing, CC REL asks that publishers of the schema make the effort to provide the extraction mechanism. With explicit extraction mechanisms, publishers have a little bit more work to do, while tool builders are immediately empowered to create generic programs that can process data they have never seen before.

# **5. Embedding CC REL in free-floating files**

We turn to the precise CC recommendation for embedding CC REL metadata inside MP3s, Word documents, and other "free-floating" content that is often passed around in a peer-to-peer fashion, via email or P2P networks. We note that there are two distinct issues to resolve: expressing the abstract model using a specific syntax and embedding; and providing minimal accountability for the expressed CC REL data.

We handle accountability for free-floating content by connecting any free-floating document to a webpage, and placing the CC REL information on that webpage. Thus, publishers of free-floating content are just as

THE DIGITAL PUBLIC DOMAIN21March.indd 169 3/26/12 3:22 PM

19 Scalable Vector Graphics, http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG, a W3C Recommendation for vector graphics expressed using XML.

accountable as publishers of web-based content: rights are always expressed on a webpage. The connection between the webpage and the binary file it describes is achieved using a cryptographic hash (fingerprint) of the file. For example, the PDF file of Lessig's "Code v2" will contain a reference to http:// codev2.cc/download+remix, which itself will contain a reference to the SHA1 hash of the PDF file. The owner of the URL http://codev2.cc/download+remix is thus taking responsibility for the CC REL statements it makes about the file.

For expression, we recommend XMP. XMP has the broadest support of any embedded metadata format (perhaps it is the only such format with anything approaching broad support) across many different media formats. With the exception of media formats where a workable embedded metadata format is already ubiquitous (e.g. MP3), CC recommends adopting XMP as an embedded metadata standard and using the following two fields in particular:

Consider our example of Lessig's "Code v2", a CC-licensed, community-edited second version of his original "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace". The PDF of this book, available at http://pdf.codev2.cc/ Lessig-Codev2.pdf, contains XMP metadata as follows:

```
<?xpacket begin="" id=""?>
<x:xmpmeta xmlns:x="adobe:ns:meta/">
 <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
 <rdf:Description rdf:about="" xmlns:xapRights="http://ns.adobe.com/
xap/1.0/rights/">
 <xapRights:Marked>True</xapRights:Marked>
 <xapRights:WebStatement rdf:resource="http://codev2.cc/
download+remix/" />
 </rdf:Description>
 ...
 <rdf:Description rdf:about="" xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#">
 <cc:license rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
 by-sa/2.5/" />
 </rdf:Description>
 </rdf:RDF>
</x:xmpmeta>
<?xpacket end="r"?>
```
Notice how this is RDF/XML, including a xapRights: WebStatement pointer to the webpage http://codev2.cc/download+remix, which itself contains RDFa:

THE DIGITAL PUBLIC DOMAIN21March.indd 170 3/26/12 3:22 PM

```
Any derivative must be licensed under a
<a about="urn:sha1:W4XGZGCD4D6TVXJSCIG3BJFLJNWFATTE"
 rel="license"
 href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/">
 Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License
</a>
```
This RDFa references the PDF using its SHA1 hash—a secure fingerprint of the file that matches only the given PDF file—and declares its CC license. Thus, anyone that finds the "Code v2" PDF can find its WebStatement pointer, look up that URL, verify that it properly references the file via its SHA1 hash, and confirm the file's CC license on the web-based deed.

# **6. Examples and use cases**

This section describes several examples, first by publishers of CC-licensed works, then by tool builders who wish to consume the licensing information. Some of these examples include existing, real implementations of CC REL, while others are potential implementations and applications we believe would significantly benefit from CC REL.

#### 6.1 How publishers can use CC REL

Publishers can mix CC REL with other markup with great flexibility. As a result of CC REL's "independence and extensibility" principle, publishers can use CC REL descriptions in combination with additional attributes taken from other publishers, or with entirely new attributes they define for their own purposes. And CC REL's "DRY" principle means that even small publishers get the benefit of updating data in one location and automatically keeping the human- and machine-readable in sync.

```
<div class="mediaDetails haudio"
 xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
 xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
 xmlns:commerce="http://example.org/rdf/commerce/elements/1.0/"
 xmlns:hmedia="http://www.microformats.org/2007/12/hmedia/"
 about="#album-6579151">
...
 <a id="mediaImageLink" rel="hmedia:depiction"
 href="http://www.bitmunk.com/view/image/6579151">
...
 <h1 property="dc:title" class="mediaTitle album fn">Lifeseeker</h1>
...
```
THE DIGITAL PUBLIC DOMAIN21March.indd 171 3/26/12 3:22 PM

```
 <span property="dc:creator" class="fn">Lifeseeker</span>
...
 <span property="dc:contributor" class="fn">(P) 2005 One In A Million
Records</span>
...
 <span property="dc:date" class="published" title="2007-11-18T11
         :23:07-05:00"
 content="2007-11-18T11:23:07-05:00" datatype="xsd:date">
 2002-07-23
 </span>
...
 <a href="/browse/genre/audio_album/59"
 property="dc:type" class="category">Hip Hop and Rap</a>
 <span class="detailLabel">Tracks:</span>
 16 (<abbr property="hmedia:duration" class="duration"
 title="PT1H13M37S" content="PT1H13M37S"
 datatype="xsd:duration">1:13:37</span>)
...
 <span class="detailLabel">Licenses:</span>
 <img property="dc:license" class="licenseIcon"
 src="/themes/bm2/images/licenses/sc-sm.png"
 alt="Standard Copyright" title="Standard Copyright"
 content="Standard Copyright"/>
...
</div>
```
#### 6.1.1 Mixing content with different licenses

A common use case for web publishers working in a mashup-friendly world is the issue of mixing content with different licenses. Consider, for example, what happens if Lessig's blog reuses an image published by another author and licensed for non-commercial use. Recall that the blog is licensed to permit commercial use.

THE DIGITAL PUBLIC DOMAIN21March.indd 172 3/26/12 3:22 PM

The HTML markup in this case is straightforward:

```
<div about="" xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#">
 This page, by
 <a property="cc:attributionName" rel="cc:attributionURL"
 href="http://lessig.org/">
 Lawrence Lessig
 </a>,
 is licensed under a
 <a rel="license"
```

```
 href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/">
 Creative Commons Attribution License
 </a>.
 <div about="/photos/constitution.jpg">
 The photo of the constitution used in this post was originally
published by
 <a rel="dc:source" href="http://example.org/">Joe Example</a>, and
is licensed under a
 <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by-nc/3.0/">
 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License
 </a>.
 </div>
</div>
```
The inner
 uses the about attribute to indicate that its statements concern the photo in question. A link to the original source is provided using the dc:source property, and a different license pointer is given for this photo using the normal anchor with a rel="license" attribute.

#### 6.1.2 hAudio

Bitmunk is a service that supports artists with a legal, copyright-aware, content distribution service. The service needed a mechanism for embedding structured data about songs and albums directly into their webpages, including licensing information, so that browser add-ons might provide additional functionality around the music, for example, comparing the price of a particular song at various online stores. Bitmunk first created a microformat called hAudio. They soon realized, however, that they would be duplicating fields when it came time to define hVideo, and that these duplicated fields would no longer be compatible with those of hAudio. More immediately problematic, hAudio's basic fields, like the title field, would not be compatible with other "title" fields of other microformats.

Thus, Bitmunk created the hAudio RDFa vocabulary. The design process for this vocabulary immediately revealed separate, logical components: Dublin Core for basic properties (such as title), CC for licensing, a new vocabulary called "hMedia" for media-specific properties (such as duration), and a new vocabulary called "hCommerce" for transaction-specific properties (such as price). Bitmunk was thus able to reuse two existing vocabularies and add features. It was also able to clearly delineate logical components to make it particularly easy for other vocabulary developers

THE DIGITAL PUBLIC DOMAIN21March.indd 173 3/26/12 3:22 PM

to reuse only certain components of the hAudio vocabulary, for example, hCommerce. Meanwhile, all CC licensing information is still expressible without alteration.

Figure 3 shows an excerpt of the markup available from Bitmunk at http://bitmunk.com/view/media/6579151. Note that this particular sample is not CC-licensed: it uses standard copyright. A CC-licensed album would be marked up in the same way, with a different license value: Bitmunk was able to develop its vocabulary independent of CC REL, and can now integrate with CC REL simply by adding the appropriate attributes.

```
<div xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
 xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"
 xmlns:flickr="http://flickr.com/ns#"
 about="http://www.flickr.com/photos/laughingsquid/2034629532/">
...
 <h1 property="dc:title">NewTeeVee Live Game Show</h1>
...
 <img rel="flickr:defaultPhoto"
 src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2320/2034629532_02085434dd.
jpg?v=0" />
...
 <div property="dc:description">
 See the blog post for more info:
 <a href="http://laughingsquid.com/a-few-random-newteevee
        -live-photos/">
 A Few Random NewTeeVee Live Photos
 </a>
 </div>
...
 This photo is licensed under a
 <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
 by-nc-nd/2.0/">
 Creative Commons license
 </a>.

 If you use this photo within the terms of the license or make
 special arrangements to use the photo, please list the photo credit as

 <span property="cc:attributionName">Scott Beale / Laughing Squid
 </span>

 and link the credit to

 <a rel="cc:attributionURL" href="http://laughingsquid.com">
 laughingsquid.com
 </a>.
```
THE DIGITAL PUBLIC DOMAIN21March.indd 174 3/26/12 3:22 PM

```
...
 Uploaded on
 <span property="flickr:uploaded" content="2007-11-15">
 November 15, 2007
 </span>
...
 <h4>Tags</h4>
 <a rel="flickr:tag" href="/photos/laughingsquid/tags/
newteevee/">NewTeeVee</a>
 <a rel="flickr:tag" href="/photos/laughingsquid/tags/
gigaom/">GigaOm</a>
...
 <a rel="upcoming:event" href="http://upcoming.org/event/286436">
upcoming:event=286436</a>
...
</div>
```
**Figure 4:** A Flickr Photo Page with RDFa: this is an excerpt from a Flickr photo page with small amounts of additional markup to show how one would integrate RDFa. The rendering of the HTML is identical with the added RDFa properties. Note the Flickr machine tag upcoming:event, which references an event at upcoming.org. This machine tag is, in fact, an RDF triple, easily expressed in RDFa alongside existing Flickr information and CC licensing.

#### 6.1.3 Flickr

Flickr hosts over 200 million CC-licensed images (as of December 2011). Currently Flickr denotes a license on each image's page with a link to the relevant license qualified by rel="license". This ad-hoc convention, encouraged by the microformats effort, was "grandfathered" into RDFa thanks to the reserved HTML keyword license. Unfortunately, it works only for simple use cases, with a single image on a single page. This approach breaks down when multiple images are viewed on a single page, or when further information, such as the photographer's name, is required.

Flickr could significantly benefit from the CC REL recommendations, by providing, in addition to simple license linking:

• License assertions scoped to the image being licensed.

THE DIGITAL PUBLIC DOMAIN21March.indd 175 3/26/12 3:22 PM

In addition, Flickr supports "machine tags", where photographers can add metadata about their images using custom properties. Flickr's machine tags are, in fact, a subset of RDF, which can be represented easily using RDFa. Thus, CC licensing can be easily expressed alongside Flickr's machine tags using the same technology, without interfering.

Figure 4 shows how the CC-licensed photo at http://www.flickr.com/ photos/laughingsquid/2034629532 would be marked up using CC REL, including the machine tag upcoming:event that associates the photo with an event at http://upcoming.org.

```
<div xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"
xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"
 xmlns:prism="http://prismstandard.org/namespaces/1.2/basic/"
 xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"about="/documents/1290/
version/1">
 <h2 property="dc:title">An Olfactory Receptor Pseudogene whose
Function emerged in Humans</h2>
 ...
 <span rel="dc:creator"><span property="foaf:name">Peter Lai</span>
</span><sup>1</sup>,

 <a rel="dc:creator" href="http://precedings.nature.com/users/
bdaff59be022e709d8b7beab298ccfb8">
 <span property="foaf:name">Gautam Bahl</span>
 </a><sup>2</sup>,
 ...
 <dt class="doctype">Document Type:</dt>
 <dd property="dc:type">Manuscript</dd>
 Received <span property="dc:date">02 November 2007 21:20 UTC</span>;
 Posted <span property="prism:publicationDate">05 November 2007</span>
 ...
 <a rel="prism:category" href="http://precedings.nature.com/subjects/
biotechnology">
 Biotechnology
 </a>,
 ...
```
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```
 <ul id="revision-1321-tags" class="taglist">
 <li> <a rel="nature:tag" href="http://precedings.nature.com/tags/
olfactory+receptors">
 olfactory receptors
 </a>
 </li>
 ...
 </ul>
 ...
 This document is licensed to the public under the
 <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/">
 Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License
 </a>
 ...
 <!-- Citation -->
 <dt class="abstract">How to cite this document:</dt>
 <dd>
 <p> <span property="cc:attributionName">
 Lai, Peter, Bahl, Gautam, Gremigni, Maryse, Matarazzo, Valery,
 Clot-Faybesse, Olivier, Ronin, Catherine, and Crasto, Chiquito.
 An Olfactory Receptor Pseudogene whose Function emerged in
Humans.
 </span>
 Available from Nature Precedings <
 <a rel="cc:attributionURL" href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/
npre.2007.1290.1">
 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/npre.2007.1290.1
 </a>> (2007)
 </p>
 </dd>
...
</div>
```
**Figure 5:** Markup for a *Nature Precedings* article, including how RDFa might be integrated seamlessly into the existing markup. The property nature:tag is used to indicate a *Nature*-defined way of tagging content, though another vocabulary could easily be used here.

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#### *178 The Digital Public Domain*

**Figure 6:** Portions of a *Nature Precedings* paper, marked up with RDFa. An RDFa-aware browser (in this case any normal browser using the RDFa Bookmarklets) detects the markup, highlighting the title and CC license, and revealing the corresponding RDF triples.

#### 6.1.4 Nature precedings

*Nature*, one of the world's top scientific journals, recently launched a web-only "precedings" site, where early results can be announced rapidly in advance of full-blown peer review. Papers on *Nature Precedings* are distributed under a CC license. Like Flickr, *Nature Precedings* currently uses CC's prior metadata recommendation: RDF/XML included in an HTML comment. *Nature* could significantly benefit from the CC REL recommendation, which would let them publish structured CC licensing information in a more robust, more extensible, and more human-readable way.

Consider, for example, the *Nature Preceding* paper at http://precedings. nature.com/documents/1290/version/1. Figure 5 shows how the markup at that page can be extended with simple RDFa attributes, using the Dublin Core, CC, FOAF, and PRISM publication vocabularies.20 Notice how any

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20 The Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) provides a vocabulary for publishing and aggregating content from books, magazines, and journals. See http://www.prismstandard.org.

HTML element, including the existing H1 used for the title, can be used to carry RDFa attributes. Figure 6 shows how this page could appear in an RDFa-aware browser.

#### 6.1.5 Scientific data

Open publication of scientific data on the Internet has begun, with the Nature Publishing Group recently announcing the release of genomic data sets under a CC license.21 Beyond simple licensing, thousands of new metadata vocabularies and properties are being developed to express research results. CC is playing an active role to remove barriers to scientific cooperation and sharing.22 CC is specifically encouraging the creation of RDF-based vocabularies for describing scientific information and is stimulating collaboration among research communities with tools that build on RDF's extensibility and interoperability.

**Figure 7:** A simple rendering of a bibliographic entry with extra scientific data.

As these vocabularies become more widespread, it's easy to envision uses of CC REL and RDFa that extend the bibliographic and licensing markup to include these new scientific data tags. Tools may then emerge to take advantage of this additional markup, enabling dynamic, distributed scientific collaboration through interoperable referencing of scientific concepts.

Imagine, for example, an excerpt from a (hypothetical) web-based newsletter about genomics research, which references an (actual) article from *BioMed Central Neurosciences*, as it might be rendered by a browser (Figure 7). The words "recent study on rat brains", and "CEBP-beta" are clickable links, leading respectively to a webpage for the paper, and a webpage that describes the protein CEBP-5#5 in the Uniprot protein database.

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21 See http://www.nature.com/authors/editorial\_policies/license.html for details.

22 See http://sciencecommons.org/http://creativecommons.org/science.

The RDFa generating this excerpt could be:

```
<div xmlns:OBO_REL="http://www.obofoundry.org/ro/ro.owl#">
 A <a href="http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2202/6/69">
 recent study on rat brains
 </a>
 by von Gertten <em>et. al.</em> reports that
 <div about="http://purl.org/obo/owl/GO#GO_0050729">
 <span property="rdfs:label">inflammatory stimuli</span>
 upregulate expression of
 <a rel="OBO_REL:precedes"
 href="http://purl.uniprot.org/uniprot/P17676">
 <span property="rdfs:label">CEPB-beta</span>
 </a>
 </div>
</div>
```
This RDFa not only links to the paper in the usual way, but it also provides machine-readable information that this is a statement about inflammatory stimuli (as defined by the Open Biomedical Ontologies initiative) activating expression of the CEPB protein (as specified in the UniProt database of proteins). Since the URI of the protein is visually meaningful, it can be marked up with a clickable link that also provides the object of a triple.

#### 6.1.6 Additional permissions

A CC license grants certain permissions to the public; others may be available privately. A coarse-grained "more permissions" link indicates this availability. Creative Commons has branded this scheme CC+. Also, since CC licenses are non-exclusive, other options for a work may be offered in addition to a CC license. Here is an example from http://magnatune.com, showing the use of RDFa to annotate the standard CC license image and also the Magnatune logo:

```
<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/" rel="license">
 <img src="http://he3.magnatune.com/img/somerights2.gif">
</a>
<a href="https://magnatune.com/artists/license/?artist=Anup&album=Embrace&
genre=World"
 xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" rel="cc:morePermissions">
 <img border=0 src="http://he3.magnatune.com/img/button_license2.gif" />
</a>
```
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This snippet contains two statements: the public CC license and the availability of more permissions. Sophisticated users of this protocol will one day publish company, media, or genre-specific descriptions of the permissions available privately at the target URL. Tools built to recognise a CC license will still be able to detect the license after the addition of the morePermissions property, which is exactly the desired behavior. More sophisticated versions of the tools could inform the user that "more permissions" may be granted by following the indicated link.

```
<h3>You are free:</h3>
<ul>
 <li class="license share">
 <strong>to Share</strong> --
 to
 <span rel="cc:permits"
 href="http://creativecommons.org/ns#Distribution">copy</span>,
 <span rel="cc:permits"
 href="http://creativecommons.org/ns#Reproduction">distribute
 </span>,
 display, and
 perform the work
 </li>

 <div id="deed-conditions">
 <h3>Under the following conditions:</h3>
 <ul align="left" dir="">

 <li rel="cc:requires"
 href="http://creativecommons.org/ns#Attribution"
class="license by">
 <p><strong>Attribution</strong>.
 <span id="attribution-container">
 You must attribute the work in the manner specified by
 the author or licensor (but not in any way that
 suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
 </span>
 </li>

 <li class="license nd">
 <p><strong>No Derivative Works</strong>.
 <span>You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
 </span>
 </li>
```
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```
 <li rel="cc:requires"
 href="http://creativecommons.org/ns#Notice">
 For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to
 others the license terms of this work. The best way to
 do this is with a link to this web page.
 </li>
 </ul>
 </div>
</ul>
```
**Figure 8:** Part of the HTML code for the Creative Commons Attribution, No Derivatives Deed (slightly simplified for presentation purposes) showing the use of CC REL License Properties.

#### 6.2 Publishing license properties

CC does not expect content publishers to deal with license properties. However, others may find themselves publishing licenses using CC REL's license properties. Here, too, RDFa is available as a framework for creating license descriptions that are human-readable, from which automated tools can also extract the required properties.

One example of this is CC itself, and the publication of the "Commons Deeds". Figure 8 shows the HTML source of the webpage at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/us/ which describes the US version of the CC Attribution-NoDerivatives license.23 As this markup shows, any HTML attribute, including LI, can carry RDFa attributes. The href attribute, typically used for clickable links, can be used to indicate a structured relation, even when the element to which it is attached is not an HTML anchor.

In this markup, the "Attribution-NoDerivatives" license permits distribution and reproduction, while requiring attribution and notice. Recall that CC REL is meant to be interpreted *in addition* to the baseline copyright regulation. In other words, the restriction "NoDerivatives" is not expressed in CC REL, since that is already a default in copyright law. The opposite, where derivative works *are* allowed, would be denoted with an additional CC permission.

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23 The full story is a little more complicated. CC initially used the http://web.resource. org/cc namespace, migrating to http://creativecommons.org/ns# for superior human interaction with the vocabulary when it became apparent RDFa would facilitate this. In 2004, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) approved a "license" refinement of its "rights" term (see http://dublincore.org/usage/decisions/2004/2004–01.Rights-terms. shtml). Had http://purl.org/dc/terms/license existed in 2002, CC would not have defined http://web.resource.org/cc/license. Thanks to the extensibility properties of RDF, http:// creativecommons.org/ns#license describes its relationship to each of these other properties.

Tool builders who then want to extract RDF from this page can do so using, for example, the W3C's RDFa Distiller,24 which, when given the CC Deed URL http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/, produces the RDF/XML serialisation of the same structured data, ready to be imported into any programming language with RDF/XML support:

```
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<rdf:RDF
 xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#"
 xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
 <rdf:Description rdf:about="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
     by-nd/3.0/">
 <cc:requires rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/
       ns#Notice"/>
 <cc:requires rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/
       ns#Attribution"/>
 <cc:permits rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/
       ns#Distribution"/>
 <cc:permits rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/
       ns#Reproduction"/>
 </rdf:Description>
</rdf:RDF>
```
### 6.3 How Tool Builders Can Use CC REL

#### 6.3.1 MozCC

MozCC is an extension to Mozilla-based browsers for extracting and displaying metadata embedded in webpages.25 MozCC was initially developed in 2004 as a work-around to some of the deficiencies in the prior CC metadata recommendation. That version of MozCC specifically looked for CC RDF in HTML comments, a place most other parsers ignore. Once the metadata is detected, MozCC provided users with a visual notification, via icons in the status bar, of the CC license. In addition, MozCC provided a simple interface to expose the work and license properties.

Since the initial development, MozCC has been rewritten to provide general purpose extraction of all RDFa metadata, as well as a specialised interface for CC REL. The status-bar icons and detailed metadata visualisation features have been preserved and expanded. A MozCC user receives immediate visual cues when he encounters a page with RDFa

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24 See http://www.w3.org/2007/08/pyRdfa.

25 See http://wiki.creativecommons.org/MozCC.

metadata, including specific CC-branded icons when the metadata indicates the presence of a CC license. The experience is pictured in Figure 9.

**Figure 9:** The MozCC Mozilla Add-On. The status bar shows a CC icon that indicates to the user that the page is CC-licensed. A click on the icon reveals the detailed metadata in a separate window.

MozCC processes pages by listening for load events and then calling one or more metadata extractors on the content. Metadata extractors are JavaScript classes registered on browser startup; they may be provided by MozCC or other extensions. MozCC ships with extractors for all current and previous CC metadata recommendations, in particular CC REL. Each registered extractor is called for every page. The extractors are passed information about the page to be processed, including the URL and whether the page has changed since it was last processed. This allows individual extractors to determine whether re-processing is needed. The RDFa extractor, for example, can stop processing if it sees the document has not been updated. An extractor which looks for metadata specified in external files via <link> tags, however, would still retrieve them and see if they have been updated.

The results of each extractor are stored in a local metadata store. In the case of Firefox, this is a SQLite database stored as part of the user's profile. The local metadata store serves as an abstraction layer between the extractors and user interface code. The contents are visible through the Page Info interface. The current software only exposes this information as status bar icons; one can imagine other user interfaces (provided by MozCC or other extensions) that expose the metadata in different ways.

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#### 6.3.2 Operator

Operator is an add-on to the Firefox browser that detects microformats and RDFa in the webpages a user visits.26 Operator can be extended with "action scripts" that are triggered by specific data found in the webpage. The regions of the page that contain data are themselves highlighted so that users can visually detect and receive contextual information about the data.

It is relatively straightforward to write a CC action script that finds all CC-licensed content inside a webpage by looking for the RDFa syntax. This allows users to easily identify their rights and responsibilities when reusing content they find on the Web. The simple action script can detect all items, even types of items with properties currently unanticipated, and display the item's name and rights description.

Putting aside for now the definition of some utility functions, an action handler for the license property is declared as follows:27

```
RDFa.DEFAULT_NS.cc = "http://creativecommons.org/ns#";
RDFa.ns.cc = function(name) { return RDFa.DEFAULT_NS.cc + name; };
var view_license = {
 description: "View License",
 shortDescription: "View",
 scope: {
 semantic: {
 "RDF": {
 property: RDFa.ns.cc("license"),
 defaultNS: RDFa.ns.cc("")
 }
 }
 },
 doAction: function(semanticObject, semanticObjectType, propertyIndex)
{
 if (semanticObjectType == "RDF") {
 return semanticObject.license;
 }
 }
};
SemanticActions.add("view_license", view_license);
```
Once this action script is enabled, Operator automatically lights up CC-licensed "Resources" it finds on the web. For example, browsing to

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26 See https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/operator.

27 Operator currently does not handle HTML reserved keywords, such as rel="license". Thus, we consider the script for the property cc:license, and provide examples appropriately adjusted.

Lessig's blog, Operator highlights two resources that are CC-licensed: the blog itself, and a CC-licensed photo used in one of its posts. The result is shown in Figure 10.

**Figure 10:** Operator with a CC action script on Lessig's blog. Notice the two resources, each with its "view license" action.

# **7. Conclusion**

Creative Commons wants to make it easy for artists and scientists to build upon the works of others when they choose to: licensing your work for reuse and finding properly licensed works to reuse should be easy. To achieve this on the technical front, we have defined CC REL, an abstract model for rights expression based on the W3C's RDF, and we recommend two syntaxes for web-based and free-floating content: RDFa and XMP, respectively. The major goal of our technological approach is to make it easy to publish and read rights expression data now and in the future, when the kinds of licensed items and the data expressed about them goes far beyond what we can imagine today. By using RDF, CC REL links CC to

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the fast-growing RDF data interoperability infrastructure and its extensive developer toolset: other data sets can be integrated with CC REL, and RDF technologies (for example, data provenance with digital signatures) can eventually benefit CC REL.

We believe that the technologies we have selected for CC REL will enable the kind of powerful, distributed technological innovation that is characteristic of the Internet. Anyone can create new vocabularies for their own purposes and combine them with CC REL as they please, without seeking central approval. Just as we did with the legal text of the licenses, we aim to create the minimal infrastructure required to enable collaboration and invention, while letting it flourish as an organic, distributed process. We believe CC REL provides this primordial technical layer that can enable a vibrant application ecosystem, and we look forward to the community's innovative ideas that can now freely build upon CC REL.

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# 11. The Value of Registering Creative Works

*Roland Alton-Scheidl, Joe Benso and Martin Springer*

In this chapter we present good practices for online registration services. We will be asking the following questions: is reliable and simple registration of works the right way to improve confidentiality and trust? How could rights collecting societies benefit from such registries? What kind of governance is required to run such registries? And do they conflict with public patent laws or authorities? We will conclude with a proposal for either adapting the Digital Media Project (DMP) authority scheme or establishing registration peering and using existing namespaces.1

# **1. Improving confidentiality and trust**

Copyright is an automatic right; works are protected by copyright across the world from the moment they are created. As long as a creator of a work does not care about his or her copyright, registration should not be necessary. The purpose of registering works is so that an author can produce a verifiable record of his or her work as it existed before it was published. This record can serve as a proof in case somebody infringes copyright, for instance by publishing the work as their own.

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1 The authors are affiliated with Registered Commons, a service initiative launched in 2006.

Users in the digital media value-chain frequently have to accept licensing conditions before they can access and use copyrighted content. A certificate that a given piece of content is really the content that has been registered with a trusted agency can improve a user's confidence that he or she may use this content according to the license terms.

Even where license information is available, for example through a web link to a Creative Commons (CC) license, the relation to a given work is not guarded. Companies who may be interested in the commercial distribution and other uses of the material require legal security for their business, notably in the form of reliable authorship information. This reliable link to the author is missing from many websites that offer content for re-use. Even if the work has assigned a license with a weblink, or the work is said to be in the public domain, how can one know that the relation is correct and authorship or the freedom granted is as claimed?

### **2. Emerging content registries**

Registering creative works implies that content must be reliably and unambiguously identified. This task requires specific capabilities, as identification constitutes a key element of trust establishment. The task of content identification needs to be carried out by organisations that are properly accredited with a trusted authority.

Registries are following various goals. First, they provide trust among parties who would like to use or share published works. Secondly, registries are being used to furnish evidence of a work's authorship. A typical use case is to prevent stealing ideas or concepts in the creative sector. People tend to lock their own work in a registry under full copyright and do not necessarily have the intention of publishing it. They register the work in case a similar idea is evolving, for example, after they showed the artwork at a design pitch.

Additionally, many registries offer value added services, such as paper certificates, storage of the work or offering a point of sales for usages beyond a sharing license. CC+ allows people to provide a link, where conditions for commercial use are described.

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#### **3. Survey of registries supporting CC**

Creative Commons has started to put a focus on providing value added services through registries, funded by the Omidyar Network. Joi Ito, Creative Commons CEO, stated in a press release: "…the grant will allow us to explore providing fee-based, value-added services, which can benefit our community and help support the organization financially. The registry is our first big project in which we plan to explore these possibilities".2

Registration of intellectual property has long been a service reserved only for authorities like the US copyright office and the Library of Congress. When authors want to provide proof of ownership of a work, proper registration with a trusted party can be a valuable resource. A traditional registration process can, however, be costly to an artist. One piece of work can cost US\$45, and registering may be a time consuming process. Now, in an era of digital distribution, the ability to quickly recognise ownership of content is becoming increasingly important. Licensing models like CC have been adopted by many artists as the preferred licensing solution to their work online. However, with the popular "some rights reserved" CC licensing, there is a growing need to provide users of this content a proof of ownership. This proof is important for all content creators as the copying and distribution of their content becomes increasingly easy.

From the perspective of CC, it would be in their interest to support a trusted authority for registration of CC-licensed material. As the field of CC registries grows, the benefits to the artists are being communicated, and possible relationships between registries and the US copyright office or other design, trademark or patent offices worldwide may emerge. CC started collecting profiles for service providers of registries that support CC licenses. The following table is an early snapshot.

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2 Eric Steuer, "Creative Commons Announces Major Funding Support from Omidyar Network", Creative Commons Press Release, San Franciso (28 May 2008), available at http://creativecommons.org/press-releases/entry/8322.

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Table 1: Registries supporting CC licenses (2008)

In the following sections, we will have a closer look at some of the registry services listed above. Still, this list is not exhaustive. There are other ways to register creative works such as national patent offices or the European Office for Harmonization of the Internal Market, which provide services to protect trademarks and design.3

#### 3.1 Registered Commons

A creator who registers a work with Registered Commons (RC) benefits from two important advantages. First, a certificate is issued which allows the creator to provide evidence for his or her intellectual ownership of a work. Secondly, and almost as important for evidence of authorship as a certificate, RC digitally records the exact time of a registration with a timestamp, obtained from a trusted third party. Typical users are musicians or photographers who are keen on posting individual works on the Internet, but who wish to retain control over them; or bloggers and even agencies who, prior to giving client presentations, wish to protect their work from plagiarism using the timestamp. These new licensing models render the free distribution of artistic works on the Internet considerably easier, as they free the works from the tight corset of traditional copyright management. However they also exhibit their own significant defects. Firstly, they cannot prevent the unlawful use of works. Secondly, the user's rights of such works for commercial purposes (for example, the use of a piece of music under a non-commercial CC license for the credits of an independent film) are increasingly more difficult to clarify, as many of these works are published without reliable information on the author and the user's rights needed for commercial uses.

As an included service of the current registration and time stamp process, RC provides an automatic backup of the works by default. These works can be directly linked to by way of embedding the generated code for the RC button after uploading a work.

RC is a service established and provided by a public-private partnership. The public partner, the Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences, located in the Austrian Alps close to the Swiss and German border, has been providing infrastructure in the start-up phase. Private partners are organised in the International Media Association, osAlliance.4 Registered users of the service may also become shareholders. Members of the association keep control over

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3 See http://oami.europa.eu.

4 See http://osAlliance.com.

the service through their vote in the general assembly. A trademark agreement has been signed with CC in 2007. The transparency of its governance is a core strength of RC which earns the trust of the users.

RC uses Open Source software and runs with a PostGres Database, and the SpunQ database modeller on a BSD platform. Hosting is secured by standardised control and surveillance mechanisms and frequent backups. In 2008, RC could establish agreements with the Austrian Chamber of Commerce, for which the branded version "Creativdepot.at" is being provided. The business model has been slightly adapted in a way that partners may obtain a voucher for their clients or members. The number of free registrations per user has been restricted, unless they use a voucher code. In 2009, RC introduced revenue-generating models for their users. This model aims to incorporate a value-added service that allows a user's work to be licensed for commercial use as a separate contract. Copyright owners can set a price tag—for commercial use of a work, for example—and RC is offering to handle the clearing.

#### 3.2 SafeCreative

SafeCreative is a registration service provided by an investment company called AAR Futuro. They keep a record of work registered for identification purposes. This allows interested parties to consult the registry and obtain information with respect to the rights of use or the distribution. In their service description they want to dissuade third parties from plagiarism or falsely claiming the work as their own. While basic registrations are free, they charge a fee for multi-authorship, extended storage or time-limited custom licenses. Their experience is that only one out of four of those who register chooses options that are not full copyright.

Table 2: Distribution of Licenses used at SafeCreative (http://en.safecreative.net/)

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According to SafeCreative's analysis in 2008, the percentages of licenses used in 18,000 registered works are:

This seems to be a clear indication that there is a demand for online registries not only for people who are aware of license templates, such as CC, but also for commercial licensing.

#### 3.3 RightsAgent

Registrants should be cautious on the ownership structure of the service provider. RightsAgent promised unified feeds to text, photos or videos, which allowed tracking uses of works. Value could be gained by building a reputation score and by collecting fees for commercial license agreements or when using the CC+ option. However, the service disappeared in 2009.

### 3.4 Public Domain Registry in Canada

The Canada-based clearing service Access Copyright had announced a partnership with CC and the Wikimedia Foundation on the creation of a Canadian Public Domain Registry.5 Access Copyright's role in this project was to provide bibliographic information on Canadian published works contained in its Rights Management System (RMS). This list of over 300,000 works, including works that are currently in the public domain and those that will enter the public domain in the future, was provided to CC and the Wikimedia Foundation in September 2007. Since that time, both organisations have used this list to build the registry's database. A Beta

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5 See Mia Garlick, "Canadian Public Domain Registry Announced" (3 March 2006), available at http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/5809.

version of the Public Domain Wiki is still being tested by all three partners.

Once testing is complete, the registry should look similar to the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia. It will allow users to search and edit records in the registry to provide additional information about individual creators, the history of the registry's works and to add additional works to the system. However, their hope according to their public announcement in January 2008—that it will be a model for similar public domain registries around the globe—is still far from becoming realised.6

#### 3.5 Open Knowledge Registry (CKAN)

CKAN intended to develop a registry of open knowledge packages and projects, "be that a set of Shakespeare's works, a global population density database, the voting records of MPs, or 30 years of US patents".7 As of 2011, the project has been merged with their hub of open data sets.8

CKAN is looking for people to register "packages", that is, collections with some kind of structure rather than individual items. So a substantial set of photos, datasets of all kinds and the writings of Shakespeare are allowed, but not an individual blog, or your Flickr photo collection (unless it is very big). The material should be free to use, reuse and redistribute without major restrictions, referring to common open definition guidelines.9 Even if search engines could also be restricted to open content search results, CKAN offers extended metadata on the collections and reuse of the material.

# **4. What kind of authority is required to run such registries?**

In order to guarantee that content identifiers are unique and thus content could be mirrored between registries easily, there needs to be one and only one root authority—called the Registration Authority (RA)—which may have responsibility for many Registration Agencies (RAgs). The RA is responsible for allocating namespaces to RAgs, and it will appoint RAgs on the basis of general rules. The primary role of RAgs is to provide services to

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6 See http://www.accesscopyright.ca/docs/Public%20Domain%20Registry%20Update%20 Jan%202008.pdf and http://wiki.creativecommons.org/PDWiki.

7 See http://www.ckan.net/.

8 See http://thedatahub.org/.

9 See Open Knowledge Foundation: http://www.okfn.org/.

registrants—allocating identifier name prefixes, registering identifier names and providing the necessary infrastructure to allow registrants to declare and maintain metadata and state data. In general, identifier management policies can be defined on a community-by-community basis. The OASIS committee proposes that a resolution community chooses to create a community root authority.10 When a community changes the root authority, it should define policies for assigning and managing identifiers under this authority. Furthermore, it should define what resolution protocol(s) may be used for these identifiers. The Digital Media Project has published Approved Document No. 6, which proposes a list of procedural and operational responsibilities for RAs and RAgs.11 This list can serve as good starting point for the steps that need to be performed for setting up and running content registries.

As an existing example in the music industry, the Global Release Identifier scheme has been established by rights collecting societies.12 A GRid consists of 18 characters, made up of an Identifier Scheme element followed by an Issuer Code, a Release Number element and a Check Character as follows:

When a GRid is written, printed or otherwise visually presented, the four elements of the GRid shall be separated from each other by a hyphen. The hyphens do not form part of the GRid. It is recommended that when a GRid is visually presented, the font used should clearly distinguish between the number 1 and 0, and the letters I and O.

*Example:* **A1–2425G-ABC1234002-M A1** = Identifier Scheme element **2425G** = Issuer Code element **ABC1234002** = Release Number element **M** = Check Character element

The Identifier Scheme element distinguishes the GRid Identifier Scheme

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10 See http://docs.oasis-open.org/xri/xri-resolution/2.0/specs/cs01/xri-resolution-V2.0-cs-01.htm.

11 "Proposal for 'Approved Document No. 5, WD1.1 – Technical Reference: Certification and Registration Authorities, Version 3.0'" (15 July 2007), available at http://www.dmpf. org/open/dmp1015.zip.

12 See http://www.ifpi.org/content/section\_resources/grid.html.

from any other standard identification scheme which adopts the same or a similar structure. Registered Commons has adopted this approach by simply issuing codes on the identifier scheme RC; thus their identification scheme should be called RCid. An administrative authority to manage namespaces for the Identifier Scheme Element is missing, and a simple directory service would be sufficient. A peer-to-peer protocol combined with globally unique IDs may also be a good approach to identify any registration process as a singular, retraceable activity.

# **5. How could rights collecting societies benefit from such registries?**

Traditionally, rights collecting societies of Collective Management Societies (CMS) managed the exploitation of any of the rights-holders rights. According to the principle of territorial exploitation, the applicable law is the law of the place of exploitation. For some forms of exploitation (for example, cable retransmission, the making of sound recordings, etc.), collective rights management is compulsory but, in principle, an author can choose between individual and collective management of his or her rights. CMS usually administers, monitors, collects and distributes the payment of royalties for an entire group of right holders, on the basis of the national law of its territory, with respect to that territory.

In order to be compensated by CMS, authors must register works in the country of their residence. Across Europe more than 70 different CMS manage authors' rights. Within the European Union, most CMS are allowed to retain a monopoly status or have conferred on them a monopoly position in relation to their specific fields of activity. The reason is economically persuasive. For users, it is simply more expedient to be directed to one collective body that manages one specific type of right. For decades, CMS have been criticised for lack of transparency (they are not really controlled by their members) and for their unbalanced distribution schemes, favouring blockbusters and top ten-charting music over independent and less commercially successful work.

CMS currently use different schemes to identify works and store the corresponding data in proprietary systems and databases. They wish to protect their assets and defend their monopolies to register and manage works. Many European CMS oblige their members to collectively license all forms of distribution for a certain category of works and thus prevent new forms of individual licensing.

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While some years ago legitimate commercial media offers were absent from the Internet, and media content was shared via peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks, companies today appear to have figured out new business models taking advantage of the "long tail", user-created content and micro-advertising. Apparently this "new deal" is that consumers (users) generate content and the commercial companies use these data for their web services. Consumers can use these services either for free together with advertising content or without ads and with additional features when paying a subscription fee. As the "freemium" model usually compensates neither the user's nor the artist's works, we have clear evidence that an interoperable platform for the management of copyright, the rights-clearing and the micropayment of services is still missing.

Network operators, CMS and providers of Web2.0 services appear to be quite happy with the status quo, which preserves their monopolies. Therefore they maintain technical and legal obstacles, for example, by operating proprietary subscriber management/billing systems or granting access to their services through end-user license agreements (EULAs), which are a mystery to the average consumer. The interesting thing is that in P2P time (Napster and before), there was still some money flowing back to the creators. With Web2.0, there is none. Service providers control the business. Essentially they do not intend to prop up creators by providing them with the means to benefit from their creations, they simply subscribe to the idea that there is "money to make" from those who create. We can ask ourselves why the demand for rights clearing and micropayment has decreased in the past. If the only viable business models on the Internet are flat rates for services and advertising for content, it is clear that users/ operators neither require micropayment nor rights compensation.

Meanwhile bis service providers contract artists or labels directly, or creators simply publish content on their own websites. Theoretically, end-users who want to access this content could be charged directly through the publishers' web services. Still, no generic solution for the rights clearing and payment of content is on the horizon, which is cross platform and cross vendor compatible. After all, from the perspective of creators and end-users the best solution would be a decentralised system where individual peers (creators and end-users) can register content and negotiate with each other the usage terms and conditions of content.

With content registration services, converging networks and next-generation P2P environments in place, there will be a new market

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for micropayment. New concepts of micropayment services, such as Flattr, shortcut the circuit to rights collecting societies, who still could benefit by adapting their terms and allowing CC licensed and voluntary payment schemes on their repertoires.13

# **6. A registration service only for Creative Commons licensed content?**

A creator of a work is free to choose the licensing conditions. The decision will usually depend on several factors, for instance if the licensee will use a work for commercial or non-commercial purposes, or if the licensee obtains an exclusive license to use the work. One can also imagine that licensors may want to change conditions after a time, because they find out that another license is more suitable for their business model. The decision about the licensing follows the initial registration of a work. Since content registration precedes the licensing, a registration authority exclusively for commercial content or only for CC content would not make much sense. Therefore, we believe that the setup of a CRA/CRags should be independent of the license.

This raises the question of whether a service like RC, being a service that promotes the publishing of works under a CC license, would be in competition with a service that allows many different licenses. One approach could be that the registration of works which will be released under an open license (such as CC-by) is free of charge, whereas registrants would have to pay a fee for the registration of their works if they intend a commercial deployment or want to reserve the right to decide on the license at a later date. A common technical platform for content registration and licensing of copyrighted content could be developed as an open source project. This would benefit public interests through non-commercial dissemination of content as well as commercial interests. Any co-branding would be neutral in the sense that it would not favour or penalise digital media business models.

A registration service for commercially deployed works would contend with existing service the CMS are offering to their clients. Actually, some CMS, such as the Spanish Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE), are providing online services for the electronic registration of works.

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13 See http://flattr.com/.

However, the SGAE Membership Agreement implies that members could not publish their works under a CC license, since SGAE owns the exclusive rights for the reproduction and distribution of their members' works.14 On the other hand, with fresh ideas and new registration services, the existing CMS monopolies could be stimulated to innovate their activities and business models. The CMS Buma/Stemra in the Netherlands had a one-year test phase that allows musicians to publish their work under a non-commercial CC license, whereas KODA in Denmark was the first to allow CC licensing to all their members.15

# **7. What are the challenges going forward in the digital registry space?**

The first challenge is to develop policies for CRA/CRags that are accepted in many countries, by all value-chain players, including the major rights-holders and CMS. Small and independent digital registries could issue different identifiers for copyrighted works. This is not a problem as long as the identification of content is unique and identifiers are accepted everywhere. Large registries operated by major rights-holders or CMS could misuse their monopolies by requiring proprietary technical platforms. As a consequence not every value-chain player could process content identifiers managed by CMS. National societies could decide to refuse content identifiers issued elsewhere.

As mentioned above, RC has prepared the technical means to incorporate other registries that could support the RCid code.16 GRid provides a system for the unique identification of releases of music over electronic networks. The RC service provides an application programming interface (API) to exchange queries for GRids. Fasttrack, an alliance of major music CMS provides tools to exchange information about their members' works by means of a global decentralised database network.17 A web interface to their ISWC Network provides a search tool for ISWC identifiers.18 It is noteworthy that GRid only identifies the electronic release of a work

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14 The Management Agreement is available at http://www.sgae.es/resources/ pdf/5/4/1180694570945.pdf.

15 Florian Philapitsch, "Die Creative Commons Lizenzen", *Medien & Recht*, 2 (2008), 82–97.

16 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid.

17 See http://www.fasttrackdcn.net/.

18 See http://iswcnet.cisac.org/ISWCNET-MWI and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ International\_Standard\_Musical\_Work\_Code.

whereas ISWC identifies a work independently of its manifestations.

The second challenge is to develop a technical infrastructure based on open standards for the protocols and interfaces to communicate with content registries. In the Digital Media Project we have contributed to the development of technical specifications for content registration and management services. Chillout is a reference implementation of the DMP specifications.19 Some of the DMP specifications have been standardised in MPEG (for example, ISO/IEC 23000–5 Media Streaming MAF, ISO/IEC FDIS 23000–7 Open Release MAF). We believe that it should be common sense to implement the technical infrastructure for copyright registration and management services using open source software to minimise security risks and gain transparency.

#### **8. Heterogeneous business models**

The third challenge is to develop business models to finance registration services. Digital content registries may offer value-added services to users in the digital media value-chain. Primary services may include the secure and reliable storage of digital content for rights-holders. If necessary, the registry must be able to prove that a first fixation (a "digital original") of a work has been deposited at a given time.

We also found that there is an interest of creative sector promoters to offer secondary services. Incremental access restrictions with advanced access for owners of a voucher are attractive to various stakeholders. For example, the Austrian Chamber of Commerce and the City of Linz, both promoting the Creative Industries, have agreed to issue vouchers to their members for the content registry CreativDepot.at.20 The service includes a personalised feed of registered works from individual artists.

The following use case describes a secondary service of content registries which is being offered to users who intend to re-use existing works for their own creations at OneLoudr.com. In order to produce a remix, sampling artists conduct an exploratory creative process, copying different samples from different musical works, adapting and merging them. All this is legal as long as it is kept private. Samples clearance must only take place when the creator wants to make the resulting creation public, that is, to publish

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19 See http://chillout.dmpf.org.

20 See http://creativwirtschaft.at.

it online or to produce and distribute copies. The business model is based on a small fee for collecting and redistributing payments of value-added services, such as bonus tracks with remixes produced by fans.

#### **9. Some conclusions on trust and governance**

As different registries emerge, the challenge of separating practices and maintaining quality standards and trust with different registries approaches. Registry services should certainly not undermine copyright in the sense that only registered works are protected. As soon as we publish a work it shall be copyrighted, unless we say that we grant specific usages, expressed by licenses like one of CC. However, we want to be able to define usage rules for each work or for sets of works, and those rules need to be described somewhere. For example, automatic enclosure of license-related metadata for pictures would be used by many photographers if it were easy to handle. Still, the photographer needs to sign her works in a trusted way when publishing the pictures.

How can we achieve trust? Registration services need to be able to verify that a person's online identity can be tracked down to his or her real identity. This can be assured by a "web of trust" such as CAcert or by testing the user's postal address and bank account with a pro-forma credit card payment. However, most registration services also offer a simple check of the existence of an email address. This method of identifying a creator may be efficient for the publisher, but not for the commercial user, who needs full trust that the work is by the author that is claimed and nobody else. Fraudulent claims of copyright could not be solved effectively either, and a conflict resolution procedure needs to be offered. Better user identification would result in fewer frauds. Following the guidelines of implementing digital timestamps (RFC 3161), a revocation procedure needs to be provided for objects which have been signed erroneously or by fraud.

Which organisational structures are providing trust? We need to ensure technical operation for decades and we need to show transparency for the processes. According to economic theory, long-term institutions are either public or have incorporated democratic control elements. Purely profitoriented enterprises may be sold sooner or later, refocus their business or just go out of business. In that case, their limited liability will not be of any use for registrants or users of registered works, unless another registry is taking over the data set, which may be a cumbersome issue for personal

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data protection. National registries tend to be rather inflexible and nonprofit organisations may not take the opportunity to do business.

For RC, a public-private partnership between an academic institution and a for-profit business co-operative of design and IT experts was found to be an ideal structure for running a registry. The co-operative is being steered by the general assembly, a board of directors, a controlling board and an agency for co-operatives. Additionally, an audit on public welfare (*Gemeinwohlökonomie*) has been conducted in 2011. All five levels guarantee high performance, effective conflict resolution and reasonable quality control.

Independently of the organisational structure, any registry must work out a shutdown scenario, which needs to be agreed with the users in the terms of use. An authority to issue global identifier scheme elements would probably be an independent organisation such as International Organization for Standardization (ISO) or the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). That way, registries would efficiently back up confidentiality for all partners involved in the creative sector's value chains, no matter which way copyright regulation evolves.

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# Select Bibliography of Resources Cited

# A. Websites

ARROW: Accessible Registries of Rights Information and Orphan Works http://www.arrow-net.eu Berlin Declaration on Open Access http://www.berlin9.org/about/declaration/index.shtml Budapest Open Access Initiative http://www.soros.org/openaccess CKAN: Open Knowledge Registry http://www.ckan.net Communia Project (The European Thematic Network on the Digital Public Domain) http://www.communia-project.eu Communia Association http://www.communia-association.org Copyright Toolbox http://copyrighttoolbox.surf.nl Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org DARIAH: Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities http://www.dariah.eu Development Agenda for WIPO http://www.wipo.int/ip-development/en/agenda Diaspora https://joindiaspora.com DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals http://doaj.org DRIVER: Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research http://www.driver-repository.eu Dublin Core Metadata Initiative http://dublincore.org Europeana http://www.europeana.eu/portal

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Sherpa/Romeo: Publisher Copyright Policies and Self-archiving http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo

W3C: The World Wide Web Consortium http://www.w3.org

### B. Reports, Conference Papers and Working Papers

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### C. Books, Papers, and Newspaper Articles

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Zittrain, Jonathan, "Lost in the Cloud", *The New York Times*, 20 July 2009.

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