Build licensing into web content applications

As articulated in a Plone community PLIP:

As the custodians of pre-eminent publishing platforms, devleopers of blog, wiki, and cms communities have the opportunity and responsibility to take the lead on an important social justice issue that threatens culture, creativity, and democracy.

It is critically important - to the future of culture and creativity - that the IP of content be precisely managed. Content whose ownership rights need to be protected should be distinguished from content for which the owners choose to waive some of those righgs. The continuum of rights assignment should be carefully considered on any CMS. When it comes to license metadata, the sweet spot for assignment is at the point of content creation. This means CMS platforms are in a unique position (with a unique responsibility) to provide the tools for license assignment.

Now its culture, content, and creativity that are on the table, not just code. For more background, see Lessig on free culture, Benkler on Freedom in the Commons or Moglen's dotCommunist Manifesto.

Interestingly, good CC support should also translate into business opportunities within the NGO sector that Plone is targeting. If we have a compelling CC story, we have yet another differentiator between us and the commercial vendors, one which demonstrates synergy and ideological alignment between our community and many of the organizations that Plone companies are pitching and the communities that can help spread the gospel of Plone. The feature can become yet another good reason, perhaps a deciding one, for choosing Plone.

creativecommons.org has built sdk's, license selection wizards, and defined human, and machine readable formats for license information to be embedded in content. See their developers section for details.

We are already real close to being able to offer solid CC support. For Plone 3.0 we should follow through, and verify that it is well integrated and easy to enable.