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The Official Unofficial Creative Commons Facebook Application
Fred Benenson, May 18th, 2009
Last weekend I spent Saturday morning writing the Creative Commons License Application for Facebook. The premise is simple: installing the application allows Facebook users choose and place a CC license badge on their profile page indicating which license they want their content to be available under. Alongside the badge is text that explains what content (Photos, Videos and Status & Profile text are currently available as options) is licensed.
This surrounding text also contains RDFa, though this is of limited utility to search engines since Facebook profiles are not yet publicly indexed.
Users also have the option to allow the application to update their status so that news of their license choice will appear in their friends’ feed. Selecting this option will help grow our application’s audience exponentially, so we would encourage you to choose it.
There are some limitations to this application and you should consider it in beta, so apologies in advance if things break or don’t work properly. Perhaps the largest limitation is that works can only be licensed on a per-profile basis. This means that you must make the decision to license all of your work of a given media type (e.g., all of your photos) under a particular CC license or none at all. Unless Facebook integrates CC license choices into their Photo application, licensing works on a per-photo basis (as users have the freedom to do on sites like Flickr and Wikimedia Commons) is not possible. Thus, this implementation of a CC licenses on Facebook is a stop-gap solution to true integration into the service. If you’ve got other ideas or find other bugs for our application, please head over to our wiki and post them.
Otherwise, go now and install the Creative Commons License Application and let your friends know that you’ve chosen a CC license for your content on Facebook!
Thanks to everyone who helped me conceptualize and test this application, and especially to the “Creative Commons on Facebook” group of 5,000+ users who kept encouraging us to move forward.
9 Responses to “The Official Unofficial Creative Commons Facebook Application”
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Join Jonathan in supporting CC!
"With Creative Commons, the act of creation becomes not the end, but the beginning of a creative process that links complete strangers together in collaboration"
— Jonathan Coulton
Musician
Seth Johnson
May 18th, 2009 at 1:15 pmWhy don’t you include the CC0 / public domain option so I don’t have to start requiring people to put my name on things?
I didn’t know that CC was including the attribution right in all their six core licenses until today.
Then just include a link to http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain to inform folks of how CC is approaching it.
Heather Morrison
May 18th, 2009 at 1:46 pmfinally – thanks!!!
Quinn
May 18th, 2009 at 2:00 pmCC integration is almost always a good thing BUT I wonder if users can even legally use this plugin. I was under the impression Facebook owns all your copyright for anything you publish. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Alex
May 18th, 2009 at 2:43 pmNope: http://www.facebook.com/terms.php
See #2
“You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how we share your content through your privacy and application settings.”
Federico Moretti
May 18th, 2009 at 4:58 pmNotice that application’s link on Facebook update for fans is broken: it ends with /creativ instead of /creativecommons. I think it’s a Facebook platform issues with long URIs. BTW, great job guys!
Grisell Rodriguez
May 18th, 2009 at 5:18 pmYeah, thanks so much!!! I just added the app but I was wondering if there’s a way the CC logo can be added automatically to the photos area once you decide what CC license you want. It does appear in my status update and my Porfiel but on my photos page it would be very nice to have it hter as well…just a suggestion. Thanks again to all.
Seth Johnson
May 18th, 2009 at 5:22 pmSmall (?) problem — the app posted on my “Recent activity” that I had chosen a license even though I canceled before committing. It didn’t post a license notice like in the picture above, but it did announce that I had chosen a license when I hadn’t fully done so.
Denise Howell
May 19th, 2009 at 10:45 amI’d like (probably Facebook would like) to perhaps better address the pre-existence (and different scope) of the license users grant Facebook. http://denise.howell.net/CCFacebook
Coca-Cola Using CC on Facebook - Creative Commons
September 1st, 2009 at 5:55 am[...] in Facebook pages. Since this is such a good idea, I’m going to work on a new version of our Official Unofficial CC License Facebook application that will enable all Page administrators to add CC license policies to their pages. More on that [...]