As the CC Platform Toolkit advises to give users clear choices about how they would like their work to be used under Creative Commons. To make sure the platform’s user flow supports the user, we looked for a simple way to let users pick and learn more about licences.
As Creative Commons already provides a way to choose a licence and they are working on a new and more cleaner interface (beta version) and PeerTube already utilises links to external sources in their help icons content, we made the following pull request to see if it could land upstream and become part of the main codebase as an improvement for the licence chooser with the default licences.
https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/pull/3306
The pull request was approved after slightly changing the text in the help popup and became part of PeerTube when v3 was released.
EDIT: recently we made another tiny pull request to rename “license” (US English) to the more consistently used “licence” (UK English).
https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/pull/4113
When publishing your video on a PeerTube instance you have a default choice of 7 licences (or no licence as number 0) under which you want to license your video.
Depending on the supported language you have chosen as a user (as a publisher or as a viewer) you will see these licences translated in that language in the interface of PeerTube.
You might recognize these content licences as Creative Commons licences and from the source code it shows that they were intended as such.
https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/master/server/initializers/constants.ts#L389
// See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/?lang=en
const VIDEO_LICENCES = {
1: 'Attribution',
2: 'Attribution - Share Alike',
3: 'Attribution - No Derivatives',
4: 'Attribution - Non Commercial',
5: 'Attribution - Non Commercial - Share Alike',
6: 'Attribution - Non Commercial - No Derivatives',
7: 'Public Domain Dedication'
}
The problem with this setup has been raised some time ago in this issue:
https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/issues/726#issue-335568228
According to what @rigelk wrote on IRC, the option is supposed to present exact licences to choose from. If that’s the case, the licences should be explicitly marked as such. Each licence name should therefore start with “Creative Commons”, or possibly take the abbreviated form of “CC”
Although this seems to be an easy small change, it still wouldn’t be enough to make them function like an actual Creative Commons licence (or any other licence) from a legal standpoint, because of the following point raised in the same issue as above.
The user should be provided with a link to the given licence, and not only at the selection, but also in the information box that’s below each video being watched.
The excellent guide CC Platform Toolkit shows the must-haves and best practices for implementing Creative Commons licences in any content publishing platform. Apart from the issue above there are some more details that are of importance.
In our project ‘Extending PeerTube’ we will follow the steps in this toolkit, but try to implement a solution which also respects the design philosophy of PeerTube.
01 May 2021
This project aims to extend PeerTube to support the availability, accessibility, and discoverability of large-scale public media collections on the next generation internet.
Although PeerTube is technically capable to support the distribution of large public media collections, the platform currently lacks practical examples and extensive documentation to achieve this in a timely and cost-efficient way. This project will function as a proof-of-concept that will showcase several compelling improvements to the PeerTube software by:
- developing and demonstrating the means needed by migrating a large corpus of open video content
- implementing trustworthy open licensing metadata standards for video publication through PeerTube
- emphasizing the importance of accompanying subtitle files by recommending ways to generate them
Video content migration
We will test the improvements made to PeerTube and the auxiliary tools such as the content ingestion and redirection tools created within the project with a large real-world test corpus. Improvements to PeerTube are upstreamed, and a release version of all auxiliary tools is published online under an open source licence. In order to facilitate further take up for similar use cases, we will deliver an online guide in an open format to help other interested parties.
Open licensing
Having a clear licensing model for legally sharing public media content through PeerTube, and also being able to clearly propagate the legal conditions attributed to a piece of content to search engines and the end users will add to the proposition of PeerTube as an alternative platform for (non-profit) organizations to host and distribute their public media collections.
- Updated frontend display of the various Creative Commons standard licences (visibility and search)
- Implementation of the CC-REL standard (machine-readable metadata format for discovery) and assist in the scraping of CC-REL data published through PeerTube instances, for the benefit of indexing, search, and retrieval of Creative Commons licensed videos.
- Changes to the data model for Creative Commons licence storage (licence chooser and multilingual readability)
Subtitling
Subtitles are an important qualitative instrument to improve discoverability and accessibility. In this task we improve the documentation on the use of subtitles and recommend ways to obtain or generate subtitle files.