Bob Wyman wrote:
Karl Dubost wrote:
One of my reasons which worries me more and more, is that some
aggregators, bots do not respect the Creative Common license (or
at least the way I understand it).
Your understanding of Creative Commons is apparently a bit
non-optimal -- even though many people seem to believe as you do.
The reality is that a Creative Commons license cannot be used to
restrict access to data. It can only be used to relax constraints that might
otherwise exist. A Creative Commons license that says "no commercial use" is
not prohibiting commercial use, rather, it is saying that the license does
not grant commercial use. (The distinction between "prohibiting" use and
"not granting" a right to use is very important.) A "no commercial use" CC
license merely says that "other constraints" i.e. copyright, etc. continue
to have force. Thus, if copyright applies to the content, and one has a
non-commercial use CC license on that content, one would assume that the
copyright restrictions which would tend to limit commercial use would still
apply.
It is important to re-iterate that a CC License only *grants*
rights, it does not restrict, deny, or constrain them in any way. Thus, you
can't say: "The aggregator failed to respect the CC non-commercial use
attribute." You must say: "The aggregator failed to respect the copyright."
bob wyman
Point granted but that's splitting hairs a bit. The intention of not
granting commercial use rights is to deny the right to use the material
for commercial purposes. For example, if I have not granted you
permission to enter my home, and you enter anyway, you're trespassing
just as much as if I ordered you directly to stay out.
Regardless, the point that Karl was making still stands. At the very
least, aggregators should respect robots.txt. Doing so would allow
publishers to restrict who is allowed to pull their feed.
- James
