Detecting CC License Violations with Flickr Images on the Web

Oshani Seneviratne

24 September 2008

Creative Commons Licenses

Different Creative Commons License Types

Attribution
Attribution-NoDerivs
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs
Attribution-NonCommercial
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
Attribution-ShareAlike
etc...

Attribution

Creative Commons Legal Code defines "Attribution" to be something like:

Photo by Oshani Seneviratne, BY-CC-2.0.

Creative Commons Schema

From the RDFa schema defined at http://creativecommons.org/schema.rdf

Hypothetical Scenario

Transactions in the Scenario

• Creative Photographer takes some very nice photos and uploads them to his Flickr account.
• He attaches the Creative Commons "BY" License to his photo page, indicating that he would not mind anybody copying, distributing, displaying, or remixing the copyrighted work, as long as they give him credit.
• Along comes "Good Photo User" and "Bad Photo User". Both of them are interested in publishing a particular photo - the "Creative Photo" in their blogs.
• The Good Photo User seeing the CC license on the Creative Photographer's Flickr page, gives the proper attribution.
• The Bad Photo User is too lazy to be bothered about any CC Licenses and just links to the photo and fails to give the proper attribution to Creative Photographer.

Scenario in AIR (Log)

Scenario in AIR (Policy)

Scenario in AIR (compliant)

Scenario in AIR (compliant)

Scenario in AIR (compliant)

Scenario in AIR (compliant)

Scenario in AIR (non-compliant)

Scenario in AIR (Lawyers' View)

FlickrCC

System Design

Algorithm

• Needs a seed site/blog to crawl
• Does BFS on the seed site
• Find out embedded flickr photos there
• Use the Flickr API to get all the information related to the photo using the photo id
• Use the QDOS SPARQL endpoint to obtain the photo owner's data (FOAF URI, etc)
• Check for license attribution on the site with all of the owner's data

Current Issues

• Does not work if the images are downloaded from Flickr and embedded in the site
• Can write license information as EXIF data, but it could be overwritten
• BFS is only limited to all the links within the seed site
• Locality of the search for creator within the web page should be improved
• Notification to user for any license terms violation is not implemented. Needs user consent?

Future Plans

• Extend to other CC licenses
• Extend to other data usage scenarios (for e.g. YouTube)
• Track provenance of images using metadata (instead of relying on the URIs)
• Social Verification: i.e. use the FOAF graph to control access for viewing, tagging and commenting on photo sharing sites
• Automatically inject the attribution details whenever a photo is linked

Demo

More Information

• About the scenario : http://dig.csail.mit.edu/TAMI/2008/CreativeCommons/
• WSRI Exchange Work on the Implementation of the system : http://dig.csail.mit.edu/2008/WSRI-Exchange/

Questions?

oshani@csail.mit.edu