RE: [videoblogging] Re: Defending the Creative Commons license
Steve, Thanks so much. I think the term non-commercial is up for a lot of debate and legitimate disagreement (as we've seen many times on this list). I've written a lot about differences in monetization approach on the part of aggregators, and we'll continue to take stock of actual usage on a regular basis and make any changes or improvements as we and the community feel are necessary. Yours, Mike -Original Message- From: videoblogging@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steve Watkins Sent: Friday, January 05, 2007 10:07 PM To: videoblogging@yahoogroups.com Subject: [videoblogging] Re: Defending the Creative Commons license Thanks for the quality reply :) I see where you are coming from, and persoanlly feel that this is a pretty good balance you've struck. Especially as people opt-in to use you in the first place, and get a chance to opt-out of various partner offerings which may stretch things beyond what they are comfortable with. If I have one remaining concern worth mentioning in relation to all this, its the bit in the relevent part of your terms that, in regard to your partners, says or for any other non-commercial use of that content. Potentially a lot of your partners dont seem on the face of it to fall into the 'non-commercial' category, and so this may be a weakness in the wording of your terms? Anyway, your overall credibility and ethics are probably more vital to making this acceptable to users in practice, rendering any small quibbles about the legal side of the wording of your tc less relevant in reality. But I find it important to know how much protection creators are getting via specific legal terms, beforetaking into account the character of those providing the service. eg an evil service could use exactly the same termsconditions as you, but could stretch things a lot further. Still as you and others have suggested, upsetting lots of people, causing a backlash and damaging own reputation is probably as large or even larger risk factor that may sway companies towards being ethical, than the legal copyright etc details. Wow I seem to have spend most of my time from 8PM till 3AM tonight on this stuff, ugh I think I am some sort of sick obsessive little moneky nerd! :D Quite why Ive probably spent more time on this stuff in the last few years than some content creators or service proviers have, escapes me! Cheers and goodnight all, Steve Elbows --- In videoblogging@yahoogroups.com, Mike Hudack [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: That's a great question. The short answer is that our partnership agreements may sometimes supercede portions of our terms of service. The slightly longer short answer is that we don't negotiate partnerships that violate either the letter or spirit of the TOS. I could give you a list of our partners now (it's a long list full of companies you'll recognize and some you won't) but it may be worthwhile to note that it's also an ever-increasing list. We aren't standing still, and any list of partners is likely to get quickly out of date, unless we maintained it on a daily basis. Even then, we would have to maintain the list along with everything that we're doing with the partners and everything we intend to do. Unfortunately most partnership agreements have at least some confidential aspects since they tend to cover the future business plans and strategies of both partners. The only way that a partner can operate in a way that contradicts our TOS is for us to explicitly give them permission to do so in a contract. I hope you'll agree that we're exceedingly unlikely to do this in a way that impacts our users negatively, and that if we do make that mistake that we'll pay for it in terms of our reputation when the inevitable outcry comes our way. To be clear, though, we have made some agreements that could have an impact on the TOS. We've made these agreements with folks like Yahoo to allow them to spider, index and display blip.tv videos on Yahoo! Video. The thing is, though, that they respect MediaRSS and the MediaRSS exclusion standard. So our users can opt out of distribution to Yahoo! Video at any time if they're unhappy with the way that Yahoo is indexing or displaying their content. There's another class of partner that we have contracts with that may impact the TOS. These are advertising partners. Many of our advertising partners subscribe to our RSS feeds and interact with video in a way that is potentially in violation of our TOS. Using our advertising partners is always within your control, though, and I'm sure you'd agree that they should be able to do what they need to do in order to deliver both you and blip.tv as much money as possible. Yours, Mike -Original Message- From: videoblogging
RE: [videoblogging] Re: Defending the Creative Commons license
Steve, Thanks so much. I think the term non-commercial is up for a lot of debate and legitimate disagreement (as we've seen many times on this list). I've written a lot about differences in monetization approach on the part of aggregators, and we'll continue to take stock of actual usage on a regular basis and make any changes or improvements as we and the community feel are necessary. Yours, Mike -Original Message- From: videoblogging@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steve Watkins Sent: Friday, January 05, 2007 10:07 PM To: videoblogging@yahoogroups.com Subject: [videoblogging] Re: Defending the Creative Commons license Thanks for the quality reply :) I see where you are coming from, and persoanlly feel that this is a pretty good balance you've struck. Especially as people opt-in to use you in the first place, and get a chance to opt-out of various partner offerings which may stretch things beyond what they are comfortable with. If I have one remaining concern worth mentioning in relation to all this, its the bit in the relevent part of your terms that, in regard to your partners, says or for any other non-commercial use of that content. Potentially a lot of your partners dont seem on the face of it to fall into the 'non-commercial' category, and so this may be a weakness in the wording of your terms? Anyway, your overall credibility and ethics are probably more vital to making this acceptable to users in practice, rendering any small quibbles about the legal side of the wording of your tc less relevant in reality. But I find it important to know how much protection creators are getting via specific legal terms, beforetaking into account the character of those providing the service. eg an evil service could use exactly the same termsconditions as you, but could stretch things a lot further. Still as you and others have suggested, upsetting lots of people, causing a backlash and damaging own reputation is probably as large or even larger risk factor that may sway companies towards being ethical, than the legal copyright etc details. Wow I seem to have spend most of my time from 8PM till 3AM tonight on this stuff, ugh I think I am some sort of sick obsessive little moneky nerd! :D Quite why Ive probably spent more time on this stuff in the last few years than some content creators or service proviers have, escapes me! Cheers and goodnight all, Steve Elbows --- In videoblogging@yahoogroups.com, Mike Hudack [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: That's a great question. The short answer is that our partnership agreements may sometimes supercede portions of our terms of service. The slightly longer short answer is that we don't negotiate partnerships that violate either the letter or spirit of the TOS. I could give you a list of our partners now (it's a long list full of companies you'll recognize and some you won't) but it may be worthwhile to note that it's also an ever-increasing list. We aren't standing still, and any list of partners is likely to get quickly out of date, unless we maintained it on a daily basis. Even then, we would have to maintain the list along with everything that we're doing with the partners and everything we intend to do. Unfortunately most partnership agreements have at least some confidential aspects since they tend to cover the future business plans and strategies of both partners. The only way that a partner can operate in a way that contradicts our TOS is for us to explicitly give them permission to do so in a contract. I hope you'll agree that we're exceedingly unlikely to do this in a way that impacts our users negatively, and that if we do make that mistake that we'll pay for it in terms of our reputation when the inevitable outcry comes our way. To be clear, though, we have made some agreements that could have an impact on the TOS. We've made these agreements with folks like Yahoo to allow them to spider, index and display blip.tv videos on Yahoo! Video. The thing is, though, that they respect MediaRSS and the MediaRSS exclusion standard. So our users can opt out of distribution to Yahoo! Video at any time if they're unhappy with the way that Yahoo is indexing or displaying their content. There's another class of partner that we have contracts with that may impact the TOS. These are advertising partners. Many of our advertising partners subscribe to our RSS feeds and interact with video in a way that is potentially in violation of our TOS. Using our advertising partners is always within your control, though, and I'm sure you'd agree that they should be able to do what they need to do in order to deliver both you and blip.tv as much money as possible. Yours, Mike -Original Message- From: videoblogging
RE: [videoblogging] Re: Defending the Creative Commons license
One thing that we've done almost from Day One is include a requirement that everyone accessing blip.tv respect the licenses attached to media hosted on blip. The relevant portion of our TOS: All user-generated content will be uploaded onto the site under a Creative Commons License (see http://www.creativecommons.org/) or on an all rights reserved basis. You agree to be bound by the terms of each license. As a creator of user-generated content or as a passive user of the Blip.tv site, you may not modify, publish, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce, create derivative works of, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, or in any way exploit any of the content on the Blip.tv site in whole or in part outside of the specific usage rights granted to you by each license. If you download or print a copy of any Blip.tv content or user-generated content for personal use, you must retain all copyright and other proprietary notices contained therein. You may not otherwise use, reproduce, display, publicly perform, or distribute such content in any way for any public or commercial purpose unless such use is expressly granted by a particular license. -Original Message- From: videoblogging@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steve Watkins Sent: Friday, January 05, 2007 2:09 PM To: videoblogging@yahoogroups.com Subject: [videoblogging] Re: Defending the Creative Commons license Greetings, Woo you;ve got the nice cc license on your work that allows derivatives, that makes you a hero of mine :) Ive been looking at the creative commons site to learn more. I fear they may not have as much spare resources to help us all that much, or rather they probably need our help in return as much as we need them. For example I was just looking at a 'podcasting legal guide' on their site, specifically the 'applying a cc license to your podcast' section: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Podcasting_Legal_Guide#Applyin g_A_CC_License_To_Your_Podcast. Specifically this bit: Using A Service To Distribute And/Or Promote Your Podcasts. We are reviewing terms of use agreements offered by many podcast service providers and will update this section of the Guide to address legal issues related to these terms of use agreements of which podcasters should be especially aware. For now, suffice it to say, that before you agree to use any podcasting services, you should, at a minimum, read the provider's terms of service, privacy policy and copyright policy. This ensures, first, that such policies exist (which can tell you a bit about who you are dealing with), and second, informs you of the terms and policies to which you may be bound. It is a best practice for service providers to make these policies clearly available through a link on the service provider's home page, as well as on any page on the website where you sign up for the service. If these policies are not obvious and clearly available, write to the provider and ask for details before you move forward. If the provider is reluctant or refuses to provide the terms up front, it would be better to hold off doing business with the provider until their policies are in order and in writing. I seem to remember reading the same thoing on their site some time ago, so I guess they havent managed to update this yet. Anyway for most of this stuff I imagine podcasting and videoblogging are very close. So perhaps they need our help with this stuff. For example Ive been restating a lot of the basic and not-so-basic creative commons principals etc in recent threads over the last day, have you been looking at that stuff at all? I would really love to get your take on advertising, whether text or graphic advertising within website pages that may embed your video is ok or not, in your opinion. We need as many of these opinions as possible, because some are assuming its ok, its legally not so clear, and it would be good to know what content creators all think about this. Cheers Steve Elbows --- In videoblogging@yahoogroups.com, Casey McKinnon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: After the whole MyHeavy debacle, I believe it important to discuss our Creative Commons licenses. I don't believe we need to change anything about the licenses because they are pretty thorough already, but since this is the second (known) time that we have had an issue with sites disregarding our licenses, I think it's important not to sweep it under the rug too quickly. I believe our next step should be to reach out to the Creative Commons community and ask them for an opinion and how we should deal with the situation in the future. The truth of the matter is that most of us do not have the funds for legal representation so we need to figure out what options are available from the larger internet community. I have
Re: [videoblogging] Re: Defending the Creative Commons license
: videoblogging@yahoogroups.comvideoblogging%40yahoogroups.com [mailto:videoblogging@yahoogroups.comvideoblogging%40yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Steve Watkins Sent: Friday, January 05, 2007 2:09 PM To: videoblogging@yahoogroups.com videoblogging%40yahoogroups.com Subject: [videoblogging] Re: Defending the Creative Commons license Greetings, Woo you;ve got the nice cc license on your work that allows derivatives, that makes you a hero of mine :) Ive been looking at the creative commons site to learn more. I fear they may not have as much spare resources to help us all that much, or rather they probably need our help in return as much as we need them. For example I was just looking at a 'podcasting legal guide' on their site, specifically the 'applying a cc license to your podcast' section: http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Podcasting_Legal_Guide#Applyin g_A_CC_License_To_Your_Podcast. Specifically this bit: Using A Service To Distribute And/Or Promote Your Podcasts. We are reviewing terms of use agreements offered by many podcast service providers and will update this section of the Guide to address legal issues related to these terms of use agreements of which podcasters should be especially aware. For now, suffice it to say, that before you agree to use any podcasting services, you should, at a minimum, read the provider's terms of service, privacy policy and copyright policy. This ensures, first, that such policies exist (which can tell you a bit about who you are dealing with), and second, informs you of the terms and policies to which you may be bound. It is a best practice for service providers to make these policies clearly available through a link on the service provider's home page, as well as on any page on the website where you sign up for the service. If these policies are not obvious and clearly available, write to the provider and ask for details before you move forward. If the provider is reluctant or refuses to provide the terms up front, it would be better to hold off doing business with the provider until their policies are in order and in writing. I seem to remember reading the same thoing on their site some time ago, so I guess they havent managed to update this yet. Anyway for most of this stuff I imagine podcasting and videoblogging are very close. So perhaps they need our help with this stuff. For example Ive been restating a lot of the basic and not-so-basic creative commons principals etc in recent threads over the last day, have you been looking at that stuff at all? I would really love to get your take on advertising, whether text or graphic advertising within website pages that may embed your video is ok or not, in your opinion. We need as many of these opinions as possible, because some are assuming its ok, its legally not so clear, and it would be good to know what content creators all think about this. Cheers Steve Elbows --- In videoblogging@yahoogroups.comvideoblogging%40yahoogroups.com, Casey McKinnon caseymckinnon@ wrote: After the whole MyHeavy debacle, I believe it important to discuss our Creative Commons licenses. I don't believe we need to change anything about the licenses because they are pretty thorough already, but since this is the second (known) time that we have had an issue with sites disregarding our licenses, I think it's important not to sweep it under the rug too quickly. I believe our next step should be to reach out to the Creative Commons community and ask them for an opinion and how we should deal with the situation in the future. The truth of the matter is that most of us do not have the funds for legal representation so we need to figure out what options are available from the larger internet community. I have no doubt that the good people at Creative Commons have dealt with situations like this before and I believe that they may have a lot to contribute to this discussion. Best, Casey --- Casey McKinnon Executive Producer, Galacticast http://www.galacticast.com/ Yahoo! Groups Links -- Sull http://vlogdir.com (a project) http://SpreadTheMedia.org (my blog) http://interdigitate.com (otherly) [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
RE: [videoblogging] Re: Defending the Creative Commons license
That's a great question. The short answer is that our partnership agreements may sometimes supercede portions of our terms of service. The slightly longer short answer is that we don't negotiate partnerships that violate either the letter or spirit of the TOS. I could give you a list of our partners now (it's a long list full of companies you'll recognize and some you won't) but it may be worthwhile to note that it's also an ever-increasing list. We aren't standing still, and any list of partners is likely to get quickly out of date, unless we maintained it on a daily basis. Even then, we would have to maintain the list along with everything that we're doing with the partners and everything we intend to do. Unfortunately most partnership agreements have at least some confidential aspects since they tend to cover the future business plans and strategies of both partners. The only way that a partner can operate in a way that contradicts our TOS is for us to explicitly give them permission to do so in a contract. I hope you'll agree that we're exceedingly unlikely to do this in a way that impacts our users negatively, and that if we do make that mistake that we'll pay for it in terms of our reputation when the inevitable outcry comes our way. To be clear, though, we have made some agreements that could have an impact on the TOS. We've made these agreements with folks like Yahoo to allow them to spider, index and display blip.tv videos on Yahoo! Video. The thing is, though, that they respect MediaRSS and the MediaRSS exclusion standard. So our users can opt out of distribution to Yahoo! Video at any time if they're unhappy with the way that Yahoo is indexing or displaying their content. There's another class of partner that we have contracts with that may impact the TOS. These are advertising partners. Many of our advertising partners subscribe to our RSS feeds and interact with video in a way that is potentially in violation of our TOS. Using our advertising partners is always within your control, though, and I'm sure you'd agree that they should be able to do what they need to do in order to deliver both you and blip.tv as much money as possible. Yours, Mike -Original Message- From: videoblogging@yahoogroups.com [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steve Watkins Sent: Friday, January 05, 2007 2:53 PM To: videoblogging@yahoogroups.com Subject: [videoblogging] Re: Defending the Creative Commons license Can I just clarify a point about whether 'everyone' excludes blip.tv and its partners affiliates? I mean its normal that whatever license, normal copyright or one of the creative commons licenses, a person uses, the service such as blip.tv normally requires that users give the service additional rights. So earlier in your terms conditions it says: GRANT OF LICENSE When you upload or post content to Blip.tv, that content become public content and will be searchable by and available to anyone who visits the Blip.tv site. Blip.tv does not claim ownership of the materials you post, upload, input or submit to the Blip.tv site. However, by posting, uploading, inputting, providing or submitting your content to Blip.tv, you are granting Blip.tv, its affiliated companies and partners, a worldwide, irrevocable, royalty-free, non-exclusive, sublicensable license to use, reproduce, create derivative works of, distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, transfer, transmit, distribute and publish that content for the purposes of displaying that content on Blip.tv or for any other non-commercial use of that content. In addition, when you upload or post content to the Blip.tv site, you grant Blip.tv a license to distribute that content, either electronically or via other media, to users seeking to download it through the Blip.tv site or for purposes of other services provided by Blip.tv and to display such content on Blip.tv affiliated sites. This license shall apply to the distribution and the storage of your content in any form, medium, or technology now known or later developed. Now as I said thats fair enough, you couldnt be sure youd actually got permission to use the videos people upload to you, unless you asked them to grant you these rights. But as you also make this sublicensable and applicable to your partners and affiliates, I think it would be great to always have clarity about who they are. It also links back to the question of what counts as 'non-commercial' activity but I doubt we are going to get away from that grey area in a hurry, I think you and many others have behaved admirably in this regard so far, just pondering what a less scrupulous entity could do after being granted similar rights by creators. See Im thinking, not quite sure, that because creators are giving you and your partners these righrts, seperately from the license they attach to their work thats valid
Re: [videoblogging] Re: Defending the Creative Commons license
This could be a great relationship. They need exposure and we need protection. It's a great opportunity. I can't believe that you heavy hitters have not totally hooked up with them (like I hope we do because of this situation). A cool public service campaign drawing attention to CC licensing and basic media netiquette would be huge, and this community could pull it off. CC needs exposure and ubiquity and we need protection. It's a match made in heaven. I am well aware of my CC licensing, and it's shortcomings (Our BIG project for 2007, a discdog training series, will probably not be CC...), but I really rely on the protection from exploitation, the likes of MyHeavy, so much. I would never post video without that protection. Someone talked about feeling degraded,at a basic level, by My Heavy because their work was feeding consumerism; I couldn't agree more. I think a collaborative effort to define and publicize CC licensing between this community and the CC folk could really give the whole Open Source movement a serious megaphone; one that could rival the Corporate Media and the Closed Net Movement. Ron Watson http://k9disc.blip.tv http://k9disc.com http://pawsitivevybe.com/vlog http://pawsitivevybe.com On Jan 5, 2007, at 2:14 PM, Casey McKinnon wrote: Further to my last post, I have just called the Creative Commons office in San Francisco and they are currently looking into our case to see how we should prevent such problems in the future. The person I spoke to had previously been contacted by a fellow videoblogger and a lawyer about the MyHeavy case, so we shall see what she suggests to us as a community. I will inform you all of her opinion when she replies to me. Best, Casey --- http://www.galacticast.com/ --- In videoblogging@yahoogroups.com, Casey McKinnon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: After the whole MyHeavy debacle, I believe it important to discuss our Creative Commons licenses. I don't believe we need to change anything about the licenses because they are pretty thorough already, but since this is the second (known) time that we have had an issue with sites disregarding our licenses, I think it's important not to sweep it under the rug too quickly. I believe our next step should be to reach out to the Creative Commons community and ask them for an opinion and how we should deal with the situation in the future. The truth of the matter is that most of us do not have the funds for legal representation so we need to figure out what options are available from the larger internet community. I have no doubt that the good people at Creative Commons have dealt with situations like this before and I believe that they may have a lot to contribute to this discussion. Best, Casey --- Casey McKinnon Executive Producer, Galacticast http://www.galacticast.com/ [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
