Cultural works and user-generated contents — images, photos, sound tracks, texts, video clips, etc. — manifest as digital artifacts and flow in the networks in unprecedented scale and speed. These digital objects, however, increasingly gravitate toward a few online services in which the flow and accumulation of information is regulated. On the other hand, cultural works released under public licenses, such as the Creative Commons Licenses and the GNU General Public License, can be freely redistributed and reused. These public licenses encourage and strengthen networks of peer-to-peer sharing and remix. We show that the Terms of Service offered by online service providers may compete with the public licenses preferred by the content generators. In this presentation, we look into the details of a few Terms of Service as well as those of the Creative Commons Licenses. Based on such an analysis, we shall give an overview on the current practice of online content aggregation and dissemination. (Presented at the "Access to Information and Public Licenses in the Digital Environment" session at the PNC 2010 Annual Conference, City University of Hong Kong, December 1-3, 2010. http://www.pnclink.org/pnc2010/english/program.html )

1. Aggregation and Dissemination of
Collective Cultural Works
PNC 2010 Annual Conference
December 1-3, 2010
Tyng-Ruey Chuang
Institute of Information Science, and
Research Center for Information Technology Innovation
Academia Sinica

2. Outline
• Public Licensing
• Content Hosting Services
• Collective Cultural Works
• Are Public Licenses Alone Sufficient?

3. Public Licensing
• Rights to use a work are granted to the public in
advance with a written agreement
– the public are free to make copies, for example
• The agreement (license) is worldwide, royalty-
free, non-exclusive, and irrevocable
• Some pre-conditions may apply
– such as attribution, not commercial usage, or allowing only
verbatim copy
• Public licenses are not necessarily “open”
– licenses may restrict reuse and redistribution

4. Popular Public Licenses
• GNU General Public License
• GNU Free Documentation License
• BSD License
• Creative Commons (CC) Licenses
– CC Attribution (CC BY)
– CC Attribution — ShareAlike (CC BY-SA)

5. Creative Commons Licenses

6. Content Hosting Services
• Services that maintain contents for their users
– Sources of user-generated contents
– Communities of content generators
• Hosted contents can be CC-licensed
– Licensing information as searchable metadata
– E.g., Flickr, Soundcloud, Vimeo, Slideshare, etc.
• Popular services are shaping user practices
– Regulations on content circulation; norms of
content production, consumption, and sharing
– Many service providers are for-profit entities

7. flickrcc.bluemountains.net

8. Terms of Service (ToS)
• ToS are the rules to which the users must
agree in order to use the service
– quality of service
– acceptable user behavior
– copyright issues
– personal data
– (no) warranty
• Service providers can change ToS anytime
and without notice to the users
• ToS may compete with pubic licenses

9. Where are my originals?

10. Flickr FAQ:
What do I get with a Pro account?
• Unlimited storage
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Archiving of high-resolution original
images
• Ad-free browsing and sharing
Compare that to what you get with a Free
Account:
• Only smaller (resized) images accessible
(though the originals are saved in case
you upgrade later)

11. Must you register and login to that site
just to download my CC-licensed works?

12. bobchao’s original (CC BY-SA)
Uploading others’ CC-licensed works? trc’s derivative (CC BY-SA)

13. Yahoo! ToS:
… However, with respect to Content you
submit or make available for inclusion
on publicly accessible areas of the
Yahoo! Services, you grant Yahoo! the
following worldwide, royalty-free and
non-exclusive license(s), as
applicable: …
CC BY-SA:
… You may not offer or impose any terms
on the Work that restrict the terms of
this License or the ability of the
recipient of the Work to exercise the
rights granted to that recipient under
the terms of the License. You may not
sublicense the Work. …

14. CC-licensed? Nobody knows anymore!
• Flickr brokers an exclusive Getty Images agency
deal for you, even for your CC-licensed photos.
• Getty Images' FAQ, "... if we do select an image
that is available under a Creative Commons
license, it will automatically be changed to All
Rights Reserved on Flickr and from then on you
must observe the exclusivity obligations ...”.
• Flickr's FAQ, "... if you proceed with your
submission, switching your license to All Rights
Reserved (on Flickr) will happen automatically”.

15. What is in that ToS for me?
• In a ToS, the service provider sets conditions to which I
must agree before I can start to upload/download
contents.
• With public licenses (such as the CC licenses), I grant
to others some rights to use my contents. And vice
versa when I use others’ publicly licensed works.
• Service providers may not care what we intend to
achieve with the public licenses (even if they offer to
mark our contents CC-licensed).
• ToS is the only agreement between me and my service
provider, and it dictates how my contents are served.

16. Collective Cultural Works
• Types of collectiveness
– Collections of Individual Works (Flickr)
– Collaborative Works (Wikipedia)
• Kinds of usage
– Access (to experience; Youtube)
– Copy (to download; Scribd)
– Remix (to download, mix, and upload; ccMixter)
• Ways of aggregation and dissemination
– Hosted (large-sized; constant updating; communal
sharing or “walled garden”?)
– Free Floating (small-sized; personal use; need
housekeeping)

17. Collaborative Works
• Collaborative Works
– works created and used by multiple members
– member composition is fluid and indefinite
– materials contributed by collaborators and/or taken
from other sources
– the outcome is of high social and/or economic
value
• Who own the rights to the outcome of a
collaboration?

18. Collaborative Works + Public Licenses
• Who can use the outcome? How to
start a collaboration?
• All participants agree to a particular
public license for the outcome of
their collaboration
– whoever agrees to the license can participate
– the right to make modifications, and the
obligation to share the modifications likewise

22. Copyright your tweets?
Check out 1.status.net by Jon Phillips!

23. Public Licensing Revisited
• “What are public licenses for?” (Shunling Chen)
– expressing individual good-faiths
– maintaining collective boundaries
• Individual good-faiths can be divided and
compromised (e.g, by service providers’ ToS)
• Collective boundaries should be deliberated and
enforced (e.g., the Debian Social Contract)
• Are public licenses alone sufficient to achieve a
cultural commons?
– “My photos in Facebook are CC-licensed.” What does this
mean?