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April 20, 2005
Podcasting, Blogs and Copyrights
I have started to explore the world of copyrighting material. Most Podcasts and Blogs today are licensed under the Creative Commons license. I use Movable Type as my blog engine, and they have a Creative Commons engine built into the administration screen that allows you to configure the Creative Commons license for your site. In fact, you will notice that I have added a Creative Commons license to my site that allows you “to copy, distribute, display and perform the work”. Of course their are conditions. You must give me credit, you cannot use the work for commercial purposes, and you can’t alter, transform or build upon the work. It took me about 2 minutes to add this.
Okay, so now I have a copyright on my site. If you are a regular visitor to my site, and you scroll down through the page, you will see the Creative Commons tag on the right side. If you then click on the icon, then you can read my license. What are the chances of all of that happening – slim to none, but it is there, and it is published, so my work is theoretically now protected. But what if you just subscribe to my feeds, with an aggregator like Sharpreader or FeedDemon. According to a nationwide telephone survey conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project in November 2004 over 6 million people are now using aggregators. Since, I publish my entire “article” in my feed, you really don’t need to visit my site. If you never visit my site, then you will never see the copyright notice.
I looked at the RSS feed that Movable Type generated and there is a blanket <copyright> tag in the header of the XML.
<copyright>Copyright 2005</copyright>
This copyright does not appear in the reading pane of any of my aggregators. In addition this copyright does not accurately reflect the copyright that I have placed on the site. I quickly (for all of 2 minutes) looked over the RSS 2.0 specification. Nothing jumped out at me, so I think I will have to dig a little deeper to see what I can find on this matter. So you may ask yourself why does Pete care about this? After all, how many readers can he possibly have? Well, those are valid questions. I did a quick search and found that some of my stuff is being re purposed, and I am not sure how comfortable I am with that.
As more and more people write Blogs, and begin Podcasting I see copyrighting becoming a bigger and bigger issues. I have friends who Podcast, and they could care less what people use their Podcasts for, and so for them copyrighting is a non-issue. On the other hand, I have friends who want to get involved in Podcasting, but it is critical to them that they own and control the content and its distribution. So to these people, copyrighting and even (dare I say it) DRM (digital rights management), is very important to them.
I am going to have to dig into the RSS spec, see what they say about it. Stay tuned, I will let you know what I find. If anyone out there has anything to add on this, please do.
Posted by pmadsen at April 20, 2005 08:52 AM
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