Human-Content-to-Machine-Data_Final - Flipbook - Page 29
Declaring Party says that the selected category of machine reuse is allowed under the terms
of the particular signal elements.
Similar to the CC licenses, CC signals will be both machine- and human-readable. The
human-readable explanation of what happens when a signal is applied is called a
8declaration.9 There will be a declaration for each signal, with variations based on whether the
Declaring Party has copyright authority and the particular scope of machine reuse selected.
We plan to explore whether it would be useful to develop a tool that helps Declaring Parties
build a standardized declaration, similar to the Choose a License for Your Work tool for
selecting an appropriate CC license.100 These declarations could be purely an explanatory
device for users, or they could create legal documents in some circumstances. These and
other implementation questions will be addressed and iterated upon in the coming months.
Based on our initial proposal, we intend for CC signals to primarily be attached to large
collections of content that are published openly on the web, and are being, or would be,
accessed using crawlers and similar technologies. However, we9re keen to understand
whether CC signals could also be used in connection with other data sharing or publication
techniques, such as via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
The string of machine-readable code used to apply a CC signal to a dataset will be called a
8content usage expression9. We are proposing that the machine-readable version of the CC
signals extend the attachment methods speciûed by the IETF AI Preferences Working Group.
Our proposed technical speciûcation for this is available for public comment and input on
GitHub: https://github.com/creativecommons/cc-signals.
Who Applies the Preference Signal
A Declaring Party is someone who has both ethical and legal authority to specify how a
content collection should be used by machines. Sometimes, the Declaring Party will hold
copyright or have authority to represent rightsholders of the content. In these cases, a CC
signal may have legal effect depending on the particular jurisdiction.
We are focusing on supporting CC signals to be applied by Declaring Parties that are
stewards of large collections of content because it is the most efûcient way to shape new
norms across the ecosystem.
An individual work is inûnitesimally small in the context of modern machine reuse, so we do
not believe applying preference signals to individual works—or the unit level—would be a
practical starting point.
100
Creative Commons. (n.d.). Choose a License for Your Work. Creative Commons.
https://creativecommons.org/chooser/
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