Geoff Duncan

I've finally gotten around to investigating some of the alternative content licensing strategies offered by Creative Commons; basically, the idea is that instead of going with the traditional copyright "all rights reserved" restriction, content creators—musicians, authors, filmmakers, photographers, etc.—can grant users specific rights by license (say, the ability to non-commercially distribute unaltered versions of the content) without relinquishing all their rights under U.S. and international copyright law. TidBITS has been using a Creative Commons license for some time; I'd just never gotten around into examining the licenses for possible application to some of the demos over on the Tunes section.

Basically, the Creative Commons licenses and intentions are what I expected them to be, and I've started the process of setting up licensing for some of the tracks. (In some cases I legally have to retain "full" copyright; once content is released under a Creative Commons license, there's probably no legal way to "take it back" and re-assert any rights previously relinquished.) The Creative Commons materials are straightforward and reasonably well-organized.

However, marking a digital music file—whether MP3, uncompressed audio, or another format—as licensed under a particular set of terms is a little tricky. With textual information, Web sites, and many other forms of media, simple badging and statements work pretty well as a reasonable effort: folks can put a Creative Commons license link on their materials (or assert standard copyright) and be more or less done: if the material gets ripped off, they have a solid leg to stand on in court. However, with media files, content producers (like me!) ideally want to embed the copyright and/or license information in the file itself, rather than merely posting it on an appropriately tagged Web page: after all, once a track, image, or other data is downloaded, it lives a life separate from the Web page or server from which it came. It might be all well and good to have prominent licensing information on those pages, but once the material is out in the wild, it's hard to blame someone for not honoring licenses if there's no reasonable way that user could have been aware of the license in the first place. That solid leg in court? Suddenly looking kinda shrivelled and scraped.

Creative Commons tries to solve this problem by advocating a way to embed a link to license and/or copyright information as metadata within a document. Even better, they're specifically trying to address the issue in MP3 audio files—exactly what I'm planning to publish! Basically, Creative Commons recommends inserting an assertion of the rights granted along with a "verify" link which is theoretically always under the control of the rights-holder. That way, when the content is running around free in the wild, users will be able to figure out what the licensing terms of the content are, and that information comes directly from the source. It's not bulletproof—and has yet to see widespread implementation in the real world—but it's a reasonable idea.

The problem: so far as I can determine, not a single MP3 manipulation or cataloging program available for the Macintosh provides access to either the TCR or TCOP fields in the ID3v2 tag set, which is where the Creative Commons licensing information should be embedded. So there's no easy way for content authors to embed a license assertion or verification link correctly in their files. Creative Commons to the rescue again: they have a (pretty awful) application called ccPublisher which embeds the license assertions into existing MP3 files. Cool! Even though it's 20 MB (how can an application which does so little consume so much disk space?!), it seems to work. So I round up some appropriate MP3s, and make repeated passes through ccPublisher to embed the correct licensing information.

And you know what? I discover that if I add TCOP or TCR fields to MP3 files, in the hopes that someday software will come along which correctly reads those fields and can take users to licensing information if necessary, iTunes refuses to read any ID3 tags for the file! Yes, that's correct: if you embed copyright information into your MP3 files for the purposes of protecting your content, one of the most widely-used music jukebox applications on the planet (certainly on the Macintosh platform), will refuse to show users any information about your content. Even its name and title.

Thanks Apple. Love ya. <smooooooch!>