...what's to stop me writting my own web browser, which ignores these restrictions, and then 'sharing' that?

...Or just use the one I've already got?

/pirate, cos well - I must be one, i use an unrestricted browser and will continue to do so, Yarrr.

This eejit needs to read Core Doctrow's "content", it's even a free download, and understand why it won't work. We need a different licensing mechanism as per every technological shift since the piano roll was invented. It's not hard to understand.

http://craphound.com/content/

gonna happen

"If you have copyright attributes associated with everything, mightn't it make sense for you to want to protect that association?"

Mightn't it? It makes no sense if you don't. The whole exercise would be pointless.

If people think that the patent system is a trollers and squatters paradise wait till you see the rush to grab web objects.

Look people - if the multi-million dollar music and movie businesses can't work out how to sell shit to their market we don't all have an obligation to help them out.

It automatically manages what rights you have in manipulating a digital resource? How is that not DRM (Digital Rights Management)?

Am I missing something obvious?

The only thing wrong with this proposal is that it's absolutely, totally and utterly unworkable.

I'm reminded of another anti-piracy proposal from the back in the days when the Amiga reigned supreme: Have a special area on the disk that a legitimate user can read, but a pirate can't.

Yep. Too much time on his hands.

This "Joi Ito" person needs to think up something useful that benefits people.

I have a feeling a database of the size required by this nonsense would be a tad hard to manage..

Do they pay him with crack?

So Itoh and Creative Commons have stopped paying attention to what ordinary users want. A troubling trend. I notice it in Firefox 3, which has thrown away the time-tested bookmarks-as-an-html-file system of Netscape and Firefox up until now, and replaced it with a complex, badly documented bookmark system that no one, as far as I can tell, had asked for. I suspect it's a "bright idea" feature, implemented because someone thought it was kewl.

As Firefox, so the entire web under Itoh's proposal. Ignore the actual users! Impost on them! They don't count anyway!

An attitude that also infests Microsoft and explains why intelligent people are bailing out of Windows if they possibly can.

Software cannot tell the difference between fair use and copyright violation. Therefore this idea is doomed to fail.

I can't even figure out how it's supposed to work in the first place. They're talking about putting the copyright information in HTML. Images are not HTML; what prevents someone from creating a link with no (or forged!) copyright? Or grabbing it directly with curl? The Internet is much more than the Web, so what are they going to do about files on FTP servers?

Computers *cannot* determine what is fair & if they could, they would already!

Creative Commons nonsensical a[[roach to attempt to replace a framework which already exists becomes more dangerous & transparent as more is revealed about such machine-readable approaches to "ts and cs" ... YouTube & Flickr can erase your account today without so much as a fair or equitable challenge, why is this any different?

Watermarking are needed the same way digital signatures are needed - you must allow the person deserving of proper attribution to sign his own work. If original unmakred content is released into the wild, we need to be more diligent in determining attribution.

But as one poster already said, DRM = DRM, to which I'll add, = failed format. CC = more of the same.

Come clean and educate your users that we are having a debate over the interaction between structured data & unstructured data. Guess how structured an innovative society is? Not as much as the status quo always seems to want (er, demand).

Boooo!!!!

eXtensible Telephony Markup Language? Really?

Everyone "puts a postit note" on their copyrighted works. The Register too. It is called the copyright notice, and if it's not there, then if someone copies it, you can't complain. All this use of RDFa does it makes the copyright machine readable too. Nothing wrong with that, right?

RDFa is just microformats generalised. It allows you to add machine readable information about the content. It's early days yet, but if a page for a conference for instance were marked up with RDFa, the browser would know it was an event, and could offer to add it to your calendar, show you it on a map, look for hotels, or flights. You can only do this if the information on the page is machine readable.

There really is an official W3C version of HTML with RDFa: it's called XHTML+RDFa. It's section 8 of http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-syntax/

There is already some adoption of RDFa apart from CC. For instance, it will be in the next version of Drupal (http://groups.drupal.org/node/16597), and check out the London Gazette (http://www.london-gazette.co.uk/) whose articles are chocka with RDFa.

whether you think piracy is a crime/civil tort/great fun. the simple fact is that no matter how many millions are spent developing DRM/securom/rootkit/insert liberty invading bollocks here/... that the combined powers of the worlds nefarious geeks will have it beat at some point.

if it's digital and can be played/listened to/viewed, it can be copied. end of.

The concept of copyright originated at a time when the wherewithal to be a publisher was confined to a minority. Times have changed since then.

People do need to be rewarded for sharing their work with Society At Large, but perhaps a government-mandated temporary monopoly over its distribution is no longer the best way to accomplish this. This is the "unthinkable" we have to think.

EU law is quite clear about the copyright aspects of creation: as soon as something is created, it is considered copyrighted to its creator. So whether you put your creations on the wicked wacki web or display them in your front window, they are automatically protected from a legal standpoint. Putting some kind of nanny tag which will tell you "oh oh naughty boy" is not going to help, even if it's technically feasible. Should this proposal be ever introduced, soon after you'll have kids in playgrounds comparing who has collected the most "oh oh naughty boy" web stuff. Human desire is not predictable, something those techno positivist goddies-two-shoes seem to forget.

Copyright assumes the superiority of the creator to the consumer

and does not assume that the publishing of the material creates a dialogue between equals.

I want to be paid for my precious attention and I want to be able to issue

micro-fines people who waste it.