Creative Commons, Feed Splicing, and Merged Licenses

We're very excited to announce our Creative Commons passthrough and merging service. In the simplest case, the Creative Commons service will allow you to add a CC license to your feed or pass your existing content's CC license through to your feed. We've had loads of requests for such a service as part of FeedBurner's suite of feed services, so to those of you who asked, here you go!

Even more interesting are the cases in which we started thinking about copyrights as they pertain to feed splicing, particularly with the emergence of ads in feeds.

You might want to allow commercial use of your blog feed, but not allow any commercial use or derivatives of your photo feed. With our Creative Commons service, FeedBurner supports merging different creative commons licenses for different feeds into a single resultant feed - the blog stuff in my feed can be commercialized, the photo stuff in my feed cannot. Since the license can be defined both at the feed level and the item level, we can be intelligent about the splice:

Blog Feed
license: attribution and share-alike
author: DC
item B1
item B2
item B3

Flickr Photo Feed
license: attribution, non-commercial, no-derivs
author: DC
item F1
item F2
item F3

Spliced Feed
item B1 (license: attribution, share-alike; author: DC)
item F1 (license: attribution, non-commercial, no-derivs; author DC)
item F2 (license: attribution, non-commercial, no-derivs; author DC)
etc.

We think this is a very powerful capability as some of our publishers look to balance their desire to monetize content with the convenience of providing subscribers, friends and family with a single destination feed. This service will provide the licensed ability to do the former without impeding the latter.

Note that this capability really starts to set the table for enabling universal feed splicing. To the extent either a publisher's ownership of the content or the content's source feed authoritatively enable it to be spliced, we have an initial approach for allowing the general splicing of N feeds.

Finally, as more and more meta-feeds and hybrid feeds are created from multiple source feeds, it will be important for publishers to declare licensing intentions for their content. Our new Creative Commons service is a step in that direction; we will continue to innovate in this and other areas on behalf of our publishers.

We have a slew of announcements on the way; this one gets the leadoff spot. As syndication becomes a more compelling way to manage and deliver content, it is critical that frameworks are in place to ensure that this content is managed, re-used, and transformed appropriately.

Note: we realize that not everybody will use Creative Commons and many of our publishers just want to use the default "copyright, all rights reserved." We will, of course, facilitate this de facto approach in our generalized feed splicing service. It is important, however, to note that CC provides a machine readable license that can be consistently understood and applied by, you know, machines.