Why We Have Creative Commons Metadata | Creative Commons
“…In addition to making it easy for people to find the copyright licenses best for them, Creative Commons is working to provide simple RDF descriptions of these licenses. These descriptions will put the important points of the license in a way that makes it easy for machines to process and work from. Unlike Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, which tries to restrict use of digital works, Creative Commons is providing ways to encourage permitted sharing and reuse of works…”
This was all over the web yesterday – Lawrence Lessig-like license management for digital/intellectual content. From an e-learning/knowledge sharing perspective I think this is important as it frees/allows usage of content.
I wondered the other day whether I’d be liable for defamatory content that I’d embedded via RSS, but actually, copyright is probably more of an issue.
Embedding self-discoverable usage rights in rss content would really open up a significant area of content – dashboards aggregated on certain areas of specialisation – reuse of content – but presentation handled by the client. I think this is a very interesting development – if students/teachers etc published their content like this, you’de suddenly open a huge, flexible data resource.