Creative Commons Technology Summit at Google Second Part

With a little of undesired delay, since we’ve been quite busy during the last past weeks, we bring you now a brief article about the most relevant conclusions on the copyright registries issues we found out during the Creative Commons Technology Summit June 18th at Google.

As panelist there spoke Devon Copley from Noank Media, Robert Kaye from MusicBrainz, Joe Benso from RegisteredCommons, Rich Pearson from Attributor.com, Pierre Gerard from Jamendo.com, Aaron Swartz from Open Library and Javier Prenafeta from SafeCreative.org. The whole video can be whatched here.

During the first part of the panel everybody talked about their projects, the way they worked and their concerns for the future.

More interesting, to our point of view, are the conclusions we ended up finally reaching.

To start it was quite clear that there was a real need for online copyright registries to certify authorships of works. Those registries must be flexible regarding prices, easy to use and prepared to accept any license, from “all rights” to “some rights reserved”.

We found out that there are two kinds of registries; those specialiced like SafeCreative.org or RegisteredCommons and those that are kind of registries because of their main activity, such as Jamendo or NoankMedia that distribute contents. It’s more interesting them to complement each other rather than trying to do the whole thing each by itself. Registries are good to register and distributors are good offering contents to end users.

Any of the existing registries are complimentary and should not compete with the others. It’s quite improbable that a single registry might be able to register all the contents that get done in the Internet. It’s not even desirable the creation of new monopolies.

Maybe the most important issue of all, and the most pointed one, is that registries should be able to offer a reliable security to creators and users in case of unforseen events. To achieve this there should be emergency plans in case a specific registry should end it’s business so that it’s information regarding registered works and users won’t be lost. It’s also necessary to find the proper standarization so that every registry could use protocols to gather the information, to store and to certify open and strong enough that it will help registries to share information between them.

This said, it’s quite logic that all registries start to collaborate to standarize registration, beeing each of them independent enough to offer added value features of their own so that users can freely choose to use one, many or all the registries for their works protection.

The ideal situation is then that each work’s registration can be understood by the rest of registries thanks to the standard and also understood at a semantic level by search engines. Right now there are beeing held many meetings and initiatives to find agreements about this issues. We hope this efforts will bring good news at least in a few months from now.