Policy-Aware Content Reuse on the Web

The Web allows users to share their work very effectively leading to the rapid re-use and remixing of content on the Web including text, images, and videos. Scientific research data, social networks, blogs, photo sharing sites and other such applications known collectively as the Social Web, and even general purpose Web sites, have lots of increasingly complex information. Such information from several Web pages can be very easily aggregated, mashed up and presented in other Web pages. Content generation of this nature inevitably leads to many copyright and license terms violations, motivating research into effective methods to detect and prevent such violations. An experiment on CC attribution license violations from samples of Web sites that had at least one embedded Flickr image revealed that the attribution license violation rate of Flickr images on the Web is around 70-90%. Therefore, it is evident that there should be robust mechanisms for detecting and preventing license violations on the Web. Our primary objective is to enable users to do the right thing and comply with CC licenses associated with Web media, instead of preventing them from doing the wrong thing or preventing violations of these licenses. As a solution, we have implemented two applications (1) Attribution License Violations Validator, which can be used to validate users’ derived work against attribution licenses of reused media and, (2) Semantic Clipboard, which provides license awareness of Web media and enables users to copy them along with the appropriate license metadata.