intertwingly

Tim O’Reilly: If you don’t think of what you produce as the “final product” but rather as a step in an information pipeline, what do you do differently to add value for downstream consumers?  In Reuters' case, Devin thinks you add hooks to make your information more programmable.

There is a train wreck coming.  And it has nothing to do with whether or not the content is “more” programmable or not.  Long before it gets to that point, one needs to be able to reliably (and in a non-reputable manner) determine whether or not the information is consumable at all.

Exhibit A: this video, which launched this controversy.  Credits were later added, but it isn’t clear that that would have prevented the issue, which leads to...

Exhibit B: this poster which has always clearly and copiously posted credits, but evidently that didn’t matter as this warning was issued anyway.

The questions as to whether or not prior permission is required, and whether or not the permission granted by a CC license is revocable are both easy to answer, but apparently not well understood.

Could Flickr do a better job of making these consequences readily apparent?  Probably so.  In any case, they certainly could improve their feeds (Atom, RSS 2.0) which make absolutely no mention of copyright.  At all.  These guidelines might help.

Will Reuters hit this problem?  Unquestionably.