Plagiarism Today is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA license. This means that you are free to copy and reuse content on Plagiarism Today as long as you attribute the article (with link if possible and appropriate) and that any derivative works you make based upon the article are licensed under the same terms.

This license is for both commercial and non-commercial use.

Please bear in mind that you can do this without asking for permission. Though I appreciate all of you who have written to ask my permission and I understand wanting to be doubly careful when dealing with a site dedicated to plagiarism issues (I know I would be), one of the goals I had with this site was to educate as many people and give out as much information as possible. That is something I believe this license helps me achieve and I wish to encourage the content to be distributed as freely as I can within reason.

The only caveat is that the images that are displayed with the articles are licensed under different terms. Though most are either screen grabs from relevant sites, logos or images from free stock photo sites such as Morguefile and sxc.hu, some are licensed just to Plagiarism Today. So, while the text is available for copying, please use caution with the images. The same is true for comments, which are copyrighted by the people who submitted them.

Bear in mind that I made this choice years ago because I believed it was right for myself and for this content. I don’t believe it is right for all content nor will I use the same license for every work I create. Part of being smart about copyright means looking at your work, your situation and your goals to find the right license for you.

Still, with Plagiarism Today I believe strongly, as I did when I first made the choice years ago, that this is the right move for this site and the goals I have with it.

Plagiarism Today Elsewhere on the Web

Finally, there’s also been some confusion as to where you can get access to Plagiarism Today content elsewhere on the Web, in particular what accounts are used for what purposes.

When it comes to social media, I keep two kinds of accounts, hybrid site/personal ones and strictly site-related ones. The hyrbid ones will include most site news but will also have personal updates from me. Site ones are strictly site-related and will contain no personal tweets or updates.

Here’s where you can find the various accounts:

Hybrid (Personal/Site):

Twitter
Facebook (Subscribe available)
Google+

Site Only

Facebook
Google+

There is no site-only Twitter feed at this time as I’ve had issues in the past with RSS posting. If there’s interest in such an account, I will create it.

All in all, if you want just the site updates, you can add the site-only social media feeds. If you don’t mind my bad jokes and personal postings, you can add any of the hybrid ones.

Hopefully that clears up those two issues and I return you to your regularly scheduled posting on Monday! Have a great weekend!

Have any suggestions for the 3 Count? Let me know via Twitter @plagiarismtoday.

1: RIAA Wants ReDigi Out of the Business of Selling “Used” iTunes Tracks

First off today, music retailer ReDigi has received a cease and desist notice from the RIAA claiming that the company is infringing on the rights of musicians by reselling “used” iTunes tracks. ReDigi’s process verifies that the tracks are legally bought and then removes all copies of it from the original computer and then puts it up for resale on their site at a drastically reduced price. According to the RIAA, this remains an infringement as copyright law does not allow an owner to make a copy of a file, resell the copy and then destroy the original. ReDigi, however, had an analysis of their own done and found that their service is legit. The RIAA also takes issue with ReDigi’s music sampling service, which allows potential buyers to listen to 30-second clips of the songs.

2: Copyright Group Tries to Collect Cash From Open Source Event

Next up today, in German, a rights group named GEMA has demanded that the organizers of two dance parties, held simultaneously in Weimar and Leipzig, pay 200 Euros ($270) for using music GEMA holds licensing rights to. However, the two parties were open source-themed and DJs were instructed to only play Creative Commons-Licensed music. Even stranger, a quirk in German law makes it so that GEMA doesn’t have to prove that any artists they represent were played and, instead, the organizers must prove that they weren’t. The German Pirate Party, however, wishes to challenge the case.

3: Apple launches iTunes Match in the U.S.

Finally today, those who have been waiting for iTunes Music Match will now have their chance to sign up. The service works by enabling iTunes users to sync their music with the cloud. This includes both tracks bought through iTunes and those acquired elsewhere. Those tracks, if they are part of iTunes’ database, are replaced with high-quality version from iTunes and synced that way. If the tracks are unavailable, the originals are synced.The service costs $25 per year and covers 25,000 songs.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Wednesday evening at 5 PM ET for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Friday right here on Plagiarism Today.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

But while the approach to integration is new, the big idea behind the service is still very much the same. iCopyright Article Tools + Syndication places various badges on your site that invites people to license content through it.

You, through your Conductor control panel can set the services offered, the prices charged for those services and even set many of them to be free.

But is it something you should add to your site? The answer truly depends on what you’re looking for in your syndication tools.

What is iCopyright Article Tools Plugin?

To be clear, iCopyright Article Tools is not intended as a replacement for other sharing services, such as those that encourage posting to Facebook, Twitter, etc. Not only does iCopyright not provide those services, but they published a report in 2009 that said such tools may increase infringement.

Instead, iCopyright’s tools are aimed exclusively, or almost exclusively, at those who want to encourage paid licensing of their content.

To do this, the plugin first has you sign up for an iCopyright Conductor account, which will require you to fill out a very long form with a great deal of information about you, your site and your work. Once you’ve done that and gotten your publication ID, you should be able to sign in and start adding the plugin’s toolbars to your site.

On that front, iCopyright’s plugin has two different toolbars you can add to your post, either a horizontal or vertical toolbar. Here’s the horizontal one:

[icopyright horizontal toolbar]

The service also adds and interactive copyright notice, such as this one:

[interactive copyright notice]

(Note: All of these toolbars are functioning so you can play with them, however, bear in mind that this article, as with the rest of this site, is licensed under a Creative Commons License and NOT under these terms.)

Clicking on the toolbar will open up a popup window that lets you license the content in a variety of ways including sending via email, printouts (including both by you and created by iCopyright), reposting on other sites, and other publication services.

In each case, iCopyright handles the calculation of the price (if any), the transaction and the generation of the license for the creator. In exchange, iCopyright takes a cut of the revenue earned from the transaction, an amount that varies based on what rights are being secured.

The end result, theoretically, is that users who want to license can do so easily through iCopyright, which in turn makes the process as simple as possible for the buyer an makes it hands-free for you as the creator.

But as great as that sounds, it doesn’t mean that iCopyright Article Tools plugin is right for you or for your site.

Are iCopyright’s Article Tools Right For You?

The beautiful thing about iCopyright’s Article Tools is that they enable any content creator, big or small, to get involved in licensing their content. Most such clearance agencies either only or primarily represent larger copyright holders, such as newspapers, magazines, etc. and don’t do much for smaller players like bloggers.

iCopyright not only lets such creators get into the game, but also gives them very granular control over prices. You can determine how much you want to charge for virtually every way you can license your work, including setting tiered pricing, as well as disabling/enabling various licensing systems.

That being said, that granular control comes at a price. Though installing the plugin is simple, setting it up, including signing up for your account and setting your pricing is going to take a significant amount of time and it comes with a pretty steep learning curve too.

The process, unfortunately, isn’t too much better if you already have a “Creators” account with iCopyright as you will have to have iCopyright convert your account over for it to work properly.

What this means is that iCopyright only practical for those who are serious about turning content licensing into a revenue source and not for people who just want to make it easy to let others email their articles (there are many other plugins/services for that).

It’s also worth noting that the plugin and its toolbars are a bit rough around some of the edges. In testing the plugin, I ran into a series of bugs, mostly revolving around the use of my old Creators account.

Fortunately, most of those bugs were resolved in the 1.3 update (though old accounts still need to be converted). There are also minor issues such as my theme not liking the plugin, causing it to display the toolbars on the front page as well as the single posts.

Most importantly though, I don’t think many bloggers are going to see any revenue from licensing their content in this manner. There simply doesn’t seem to be enough interest in this kind of paid licensing of blogger and smaller creator content as most of the sharing of such content is done via social networking and via tools that don’t require a license at all.

Even though iCopyright has licensed nearly 3 million articles this year, most of that is, almost certainly, from the company’s larger partners.

That being said, iCopyright may find an audience with mid-sized publishers with these tools. Sites that perhaps are too small to be considered a “big fish” but still large enough and in a good niche to see at least some licensing.

Bottom Line

Someone who is casually interested in licensing probably will find these tools to be overwhelming in terms of complexity and underwhelming in terms of rewards. The true niche for this product is slightly upfield, with mid-sized publishers who can expect to earn some revenue, but not enough to warrant creating an in-house licensing system.

But even with that there are still some rough edges that need to be polished and definitely some room to improve the simplicity of the entire process on the creator side (as opposed to the purchaser side, which is very straightforward).

It’s also worth noting that iCopyright Article Tools are incompatible with Creative Commons Licenses, unless you use the tools to sell commercial rights not granted in the CC license.

In the end, if you’re in the niche that’s best served by these tools, you should definitely give them a try. But if you’re not, you’ll probably want to take a pass and find other ways to benefit from sharing, such as focusing more on social media.

Disclosure: I have done paid consulting for iCopyright in the past.

Have any suggestions for the 3 Count? Let me know via Twitter @plagiarismtoday.

1: Judge Suggests DMCA Allows DVD Ripping if You Own the DVD

First off today, a judge has tossed a lawsuit against UCLA filed by Ambrose Video Publishing. The lawsuit claimed that UCLA’s ripping of DVDs for the purpose of streaming movies to students in class (both online and off) was a violation of the DMCA for circumventing the digital locks and a violation of copyright for the streaming. The judge ruled that the educational nature of the use gave UCLA a wide berth in streaming the clips and that, more importantly, since UCLA legally purchased the DVDs its circumvention of the DRM was not a violation. However, given how brief the judge’s mention of the DMCA was, many are wondering if the opinion will stand on appeal if one is filed.

2: Digital Monopolies A Bigger Threat Than Piracy, Says Miramax CEO

Next up today, Miramax CEO, Mike Lang, said in a keynote at the recent MIPCOM Conference that piracy can largely be mitigated by giving customers what they want and that monopolies over media, such as the near-monopoly Apple enjoyes in the music industry, are a much bigger threat to the industry than piracy. He said piracy alone isn’t to blame for the decline in the record industry and that other variables, such as the reduced price of digital media, have had roles as well. He also said the movie industry has learned a great deal from watching the music industry struggle and is working to avoid the same mistakes.

3: Walters Art Museum Removes Copyright Restrictions on 10,000 Images

Finally today, the Walters museum of art in Baltimore has relaunched their site and, along with it, put some 10,000 of their images under a Creative Commons license. The license, CC-NC-SA, allows people to download the works for free, which they offer links for, and reuse them in non-commercial purposes so long as they attribute the use and offer any derivative under the same license. The site upgrade comes from a grant made by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Wednesday evening at 5 PM ET for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Friday right here on Plagiarism Today.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

The problem largely centers around the issue of what is known as duplicate content, or content that can be found at more than one place online. This is a problem because search engines typically like to display a variety of results for every query and routinely hide or drop down pages that are too similar to each other.

That being said, SEO is also often about linking, something that those who use Creative Commons works are usually obliged to do (when appropriate for the medium). This means that, while licensing your content via Creative Commons may raise a spectre of duplicate content, it also opens the doors to increased search engine trust.

So how does Creative Commons impact SEO? There’s no simple answer but there is definitely a lot of theory to pour over.

The SEO of Licensing Your Work

When you license your work under a Creative Commons License, or any open license for that matter, you’re putting it out there with the intention that others will use it. That, in turn, means multiple copies of your work floating around on the Web, each competing for the same attention from the search engines.

That is what brings about the aforementioned duplicate content issue. Google doesn’t want to give the same article (or a very similar one) two slots on the same results page so one has to either be pushed into the supplemental index or to a much lower ranking.

Usually, Google attempts to make a determination about which article is the original and which is the duplicate. However, as they recently admitted, they aren’t perfect at doing that as they sometimes index sites out of order. So, even though Google claims claim that the duplicate content “penalty” doesn’t exist, there’s still a real risk of being hurt in the rankings due to multiple copies of a work floating around.

However, Creative Commons uses of a work are typically supposed to come with a link back to the source as well as an acknowledgement of the license the content was used under. This is part of why Creative Commons can be such a powerful force to stop scraping.

These signs are pretty clear indications to the search engines as to which site is the original and that is why the SEO risk of legitimate Creative Commons use is much less than with scraping and/or plagiarism.

Also, since Creative Commons reuse is most often done by humans and not automated scrapers, the original has much more time online before the duplicates appear, increasing the likelihood it has been indexed and discovered as the original, further reducing the dangers.

For images, this risk is significantly less. The reason is that Google doesn’t do quite as good of a job spotting duplicate content in image search results and doesn’t put as much emphasis on originality. A simple image search will often turn up many different versions of the same image, often just different sizes.

That being said, Google is getting somewhat better at this and that may become an increasing fear as time goes on.

However, on the positive side, both images and text uses of CC-Licensed works can be used to generate inbound links and many SEO experts view Creative Commons as a great way to generate such links to your sites and profiles.

This assumes, of course, that everyone using CC-Licensed work is playing by the rules but, those that aren’t are committing copyright infringement the same as if the work wasn’t Creative Commons at all.

In the end, the risks are likely minimal but the value of the reward will depend on how much you can gain from the inbound links, something that will vary wildly from site to site.

The SEO of Using Creative Commons Content

On the flip side of the coin, you know instantly when you use a Creative Commons article or blog post that you’re getting something that’s been posted elsewhere and probably for some length of time.

As such, there’s probably little expectation that the article will be of much SEO value as Google will spot it as a duplicate and treat it as such. This is especially true since the Farmer/Panda updates that came down hard on content farms and other sites seen has having “low quality” and duplicate content.

That being said, images may provide some SEO benefit as they can often be picked up despite being duplicates. This is especially true if they are resized prior to being reposted.

However, if you use Creative Commons content on your site, SEO benefit probably should not be your primary motivation. Typically, it’s more about filling blank spots in your posting schedule and getting useful content out to your existing readers, rather than trying to obtain some SEO benefit.

For the purpose of SEO, original and compelling content is almost always best.

This isn’t to say you can’t rank well with duplicate content, but the odds are slim and the next shift in the winds at Google could blow away your efforts.

Instead, if you want SEO benefit from Creative Commons content, your best bet is, most likely, to find content you can create derivative works from and use the content as a building block to make something new.

That, in turn, will be much more compelling to the search engines than a mere copy/paste.

Bottom Line

In the end, the SEO risks of licensing your content via Creative Commons are fairly low. Though duplicate content is real concern, legitimate CC-licensed use is far less likely to harm your site than scraping, plagiarism and other forms of non-attributed use.

That being said, Google isn’t perfect and mistakes will happen, but most likely there’s not much harm that can come from licensing your content this way, at least from an SEO-only standpoint, and given the potential for inbound links there is at least the potential for some gain.

Still, the choice of using a Creative Commons License is a personal one and, even if the SEO risks are low it still isn’t right for everyone.

Basically, this is just one factor of many to weigh and, even then, for some the risks may not outweigh the rewards, especially for those who already have a ton of inbound links and have little use for a few more.

All of these tools are designed to overcome the same problem: While there are thousands upon thousands of images available for easy reuse under Creative Commons Licenses in Flickr, properly attributing those images is time-consuming and can be very confusing.

However, Wylio takes things a step farther. Rather than just making it easy to add attribution to an image, Wylio helps by resizing and formatting the image for easy inclusion in your blog.

But is Wylio really worth using? The answer really depends on your situation and what you’re trying to accomplish with CC-licensed images.

How Wylio Works

photo © 2007 Rich Anderson | more info (via: Wylio)

For anyone who has used a tool like PhotoDropper or even just a basic Flickr search, using Wylio should be pretty simple as the process is pretty much the same. To illustrate this, I’m going to walk you through the process of creating the image you see to the right, including resizing and adding the attribution.

First, one has to pull up the Wylio home page and then perform a basic search for the image that they are looking for. This works the same as any other image search, including Flickr’s.

Once that’s done, you then get a grid view of images that Flickr has returned and you can select the image that you want.

Once you do that, you are then greeted with a popup that presents several options for formatting the image including the ability to justify the image left, right or center, a slider to resize the image and, for premium users, a textbox for setting an absolute width of the image.

Once you’re done formatting the image you simply click “Get the Code” and then copy and paste that code into your post, being careful to not post it in between any existing HTML tags.

The process is fairly straightforward and usually only takes a few moments per image. That being said, more advanced users may want to look at Wylio’s premium account, which is $3 per month and enables downloading of images with attribution written to the image file itself (great for print use), the ability to customize credit colors and change many of the default settings.

With that being said, there’s a lot to like about Wylio and a lot of reasons to call it the best tool for inserting Creative Commons images into your blog.

What Wylio Gets Right

Having spent much of this morning toying with Wylio, there’s a lot that I like about it and a lot of reasons I’m very tempted to make greater use of it.

1. Resizing Feature: Wylio is the only tool of its kind that I’m aware of that lets you resize images on the site before embedding rather than choosing from broad sizes such as “Small” and “Medium”. This gives Wylio much greater layout flexibility and makes it a lot easier to use, especially with its preview feature.
2. Image Download: A compelling premium feature, the ability to download images with the attribution burned onto the file itself is very handy for those wanting to make print use of Flickr images. (Note: Sample downloaded image below.)
3. Search Results: Though this is more a product of Flickr than Wylio, the image search results on Wylio do appear to be very good, returning a reasonable number of results with decent accuracy even for strange terms.
4. Speed: The process of using Wylio was fast, with almost no learning curve, good results and snappy response times. I was making my first embed within a minute of visiting the site.
5. Good Pricing: $3 per months is definitely not a bad price point, not if the service works well. Though not free, as with similar tools, it’s a reasonable price if it can be justified.

All of this being said, Wylio is far from a perfect service and I certainly have my concerns/objections and they too have to be weighed.

Where Wylio Falls Down

With any new startup, especially considering they just launched the existing version of Wylio a few weeks ago, I would expect a few snafus. Still, they might be good reasons to avoid using the service, at least until the kinks are straightened out.

1. Incomplete CC Attribution: When using the embed code, Wylio omits including a link to the license itself, which is a requirement under Creative Commons. The license is present on the downloaded version.
2. The Wylio Link: Every downloaded image and every embed, regardless of whether you are a premium member, carries a link to Wylio.com. It would be trivial to remove this link from the HTML, but Wylio’s TOS forbids it. Considering that the link is “dofollowed”, repeated use of Wylio on your site might be seen as spammy by Google. Considering that the Wylio link is not part of the attribution for the image, it seems strange to be forced to link to them, even when paying.
3. No Non-Commerical Images: Finally, since Wylio is a for-profit venture, they do not enable you to search for non-commercial licensed images, likely limiting the number of images available to you. That being said, Wylio does raise some interesting questions about the non-commercial clause in Creative Commons and how it applies to middle men, such as Wylio.
4. Ugly HTML Code: The HTML code provided by Wylio is effective but it’s fairly ugly, you can see for yourself when you view the source of this page.
5. Image Loads from Wylio: Finally, the images that you embed load from Wylio’s servers, which makes me nervous. Though I’m not against embedding images, Wylio is still a new service that hasn’t yet proved itself in this area.

Of these issues, the first two are the most disconcerting but also the easiest to fix. The rest are, for the most part, problems that are going to be inherent with using a service like Wylio and likely won’t be major issues but also can’t be easily avoided.

Bottom Line

Currently, I have six more days in my free trial of Wylio premium and, most likely, I’m going to cancel before that time is up. While I think that Wylio has some great features and is very compelling in many ways, the lack of a proper CC attribution and having the Wylio link forced on every embed is disconcerting. I can’t recommend using Wylio until those issues are corrected.

Even with those problems corrected, I doubt that I’m going to shift from making Morguefile my default image search site. By using a license that doesn’t require attribution, Morguefile avoids the issue altogether and offers a similar resizing tool that helps me get the image into the site easily.

Furthermore, I’m really fond of WordPress’ media uploader and like that Morguefile makes it easy to resize and download images for easy upload for free. While Wylio can do that, it’s a premium service and the attribution makes it harder to size appropriately.

In short, Morguefile is just easier and prettier when it’s all said and done and it avoids the thorny issues Wylio raises.

That being said, if you’re committed to using CC-licensed work on your blog, and there are many good reasons to be, Wylio is likely your best choice. PhotoDropper works well, but the flexibility provided by Wylio is just much greater as is the speed and ease of use.

For those wanting to embed CC images, Wylio is likely the best choice, especially if they are able to fix the issues I noticed. It may not be perfect, but it’s definitely a leap ahead.

Sample Downloaded Image

Have any suggestions for the 3 Count? Let me know via Twitter @plagiarismtoday.

1: Apple, Feds to Put Squeeze on Jailbreaking

First off today, Apple, according to reports, has asked the Federal government to clamp down on iPhone jailbreaking applications, claiming that they are creating unlawful derivatives of Apple’s bootloader for the iPhone. Though the U.S. Copyright Office recently ruled iPhone jailbreaking to be a legal circumvention of DRM, it’s less clear if the creation of derivative works in the process of making a jailbreak app is legal. Note: I am still seeking more reliable confirmation of this story and will update as I find it.

2: Israeli Court Enforces for the First Time a Creative Commons License

Next up today, Israel has become the latest country to uphold Creative Commons licenses in court. The case involved an amateur photographer who uploaded images to Flickr under a non-commercial license only to have a book publisher use the images both in print and, at least in one case, online. The court ruled that the unauthorized use was an infringement without as much as a word regarding the license. The court also shot down a fair use argument by the publisher, saying that moral rights, the right to attribution in this case, prevented such an argument. Special thanks to Lorelle VanFossen for the link!

3: Privacy, Copyright Top Challenges of the Internet

Finally today, International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, an organization of 750 thought-leaders on the Internet who also pick the winners of the Webby Awards, have named privacy and copyright as two of the biggest challenges facing the Web. Specifically, the group said there should be a focus on modernizing copyright law to make sure it reflects “the current relationship between technology and creativity.”

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

Want the Full Story?

Tune in every Wednesday evening at 6 PM ET for the live recording of the Copyright 2.0 Show or wait and get the edited version Friday right here on Plagiarism Today.

The 3 Count Logo was created by Justin Goff and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

The Konomark was developed by Eric E. Johnson, an Associate Professor at the University of North Dakota School of Law as a way of encouraging open sharing of work without the need of entering into a license.

The reason is that Konomark is not a license at all. Rather, it’s an indication that rights to the work may be freely available and it’s an invitation for visitors to ask for permission. This means you don’t actually surrender any rights to your work, you can simply say “no” to everyone who asks and the decision to use a Konomark is not permanent.

According to the site, the three rules for using Konomark as are follow:

1. You use the konomark only to mark your own copyrighted works.
2. By konomarking a copyrighted work, you intend to invite people to ask you for permission to use that work.
3. You are generally amenable to letting people use, without compensating you, the copyrighted content you’ve konomarked – even though the konomark does not legally obligate you.

All one has to do is either download the image and put it up on their site or use the simple HTML code provided. Since there is no license created, there are no terms to select.

Though I haven’t seen any other sites with the Konomark, it’s been available since 2008. The question remains though, who will be interested in using it and in taking advantage of works bearing the mark?

General Thoughts

The potential benefit of Konomark is pretty clear. Many people are open to the idea of allowing content reuse but either don’t wish to commit to a license or don’t wish to add a licensing layer to it. The Konomark is a simple, attractive way to add an encouragement to ask for permission.

That being said, it doesn’t really do anything that can’t be achieved by saying “Some Rights Reserved, Ask For Permission” prominently on your site. In that regard, it is very similar to Lorelle VanFossen’s “Ask First” buttons, icons that ask others to seek permission.

Another potential issue is that the mark might be misunderstood by site visitors to be just another open licensing scheme, encouraging others (unwittingly) to take works without permission. Since the mark looks somewhat similar to Creative Commons and other copyright markers to the like and is not well-known, it might create problems.

However, the potentially biggest issue is that the idea of asking for permission and waiting for a reply is, usually, an avoidable obstacle. If I need an image for a blog post, I can use any number of stock photo sites and be up and running in seconds, legally. For most casual use, this is just a more efficient system and it’s one that works better for both the creator trying to encourage use and the person seeking to use the work.

Still, I can definitely still see situations where this mark might be a valid alternative. The real question is whether or not the mark will gain enough visibility to add benefit that goes beyond what a creator can do themselves.

Bottom Line

According to the site, Kono means to “invite, prompt, or ask in” and that the pineapple is a symbol of friendship. This is definitely the heart of Konomark, which definitely has the best of intentions and, all in all, not a terrible idea.

However, as much as I want to find a place for it, and many creators may be able to do so, it seems to have largely been passed by and like it would just be a less convenient solution to a problem that many feel is already solved adequately.

As much as I would like Konomark to succeed, it certainly has its heart in the right place, I’m not optimistic at this time and it seems others share that viewpoint. I’m hoping that, maybe, some of you can convince me otherwise.

The theme this week seemed to be one of disappointment as negotiators for the U.S. were disappointed with ACTA, record labels were disappointed in Ireland and Creative Commons fans were disappointed by a new policy at the CBC. So feel free to get out your tissues and prepare to wipe away some (possibly crocodile) tears as the Copyright 2.0 Show takes you down to Heartbreak Hotel.

This week’s stories include:

• Final Text of ACTA Leaked, U.S. Accused of Caving
• Irish Court Strikes Down Three Strikes
• Police Arrest Mulve Operator
• CBC Ditches Some Creative Commons Works
• Apple May Again be Working on Music Subscription Service
• Some Rational Words from the MPAA, Some Less Reasonable Ones from Gene Simmons

You can download the MP3 file here (direct download). Those interested in subscribing to the show can do so via this feed.

Show Notes

About the Hosts

Jonathan Bailey

Jonathan Bailey (@plagiarismtoday) is the Webmaster and author of Plagiarism Today (Hint: You’re there now) and works as a copyright and plagiarism consultant. Though not an attorney, he has resolved over 700 cases of plagiarism involving his own work and has helped countless others protect their work and develop strategies for making their content work as hard as possible toward their goals.

Patrick O’Keefe

Patrick O’Keefe (@iFroggy) is the owner of the iFroggy Network, a network of websites covering various interests. He’s the author of the book “Managing Online Forums,” a practical guide to managing online communities and social spaces. He maintains a blog about online community management at ManagingCommunities.com and a personal blog at patrickokeefe.com.

The mark expands their ongoing efforts in dealing with works without copyright. Previously, they introduced CC0, a public domain dedication system that let users waive rights to their own work (as far as possible under the law).

Users who are interested in taking advantage of the work can fill out the form to create the mark. Unlike regular Creative Commons licenses, the work is not licensed under the terms but rather is identified as being in the public domain. This means that the Mark contains information about both the person who created the work and the person who identified it as being in the public domain.

Here’s an example of the mark (Note: Obviously, this work is not in the public domain, but rather, is under the usual CC license, as such, I stripped the meta information and left in the visual content, slightly reformatted.):

This work (This is a Test, by Some Really Dead Person), identified by Jonathan Bailey, is free of known copyright restrictions.

The mark does have a few limitations. For one it is not for works that are in the public domain in some jurisdictions but not others. Also, the mark is not for works where the author placed the work into the public domain by the rightsholder. Rather, this mark is solely for works that have lapsed into the public domain naturally, meaning it is almost exclusively for very old works.

Despite the limitations, the mark does have its first major user, Europeana, Europe’s public digital library/archive, which has adopted it for works in its archive that it has affirmed to be in the public domain, which will include millions of works in its database.

The next phase for the Creative Commons Organization on the public domain front is creating means to mark works as being in the public domain in certain jurisdictions but not others, which would enable users to mark a wider variety of content.