One of the Big Ideas running around the Creative Commons Tech Summit last week was this theory of licenses as metadata. This isn't a conceptual leap so much as a technological one: in a sense, lots of attached rights can be conceived as metadata. Property rights that travel with the land, individual rights that attach in a given country, and, yes, copyrights attached to a work. But this isn't a reductio argument--it just goes to show the depth of the word. If, as the physicists say, all is information, then anything descriptive, in a sense, metadata.
So why licenses as metadata in the classical sense (that is, data about data)? Because we're talking about things that are easily expressed as data that can be manipulated to an almost infinite degree. Take digital music. It's just bits that encode for a song, along with some metadata that describes the song. All the CC folks want is to make sure that the two pieces, the data and the metadata, travel together. So I think the math equation looks something like this: the importance of metadata varies proportionally with the ease of transmission of the data. Compared to e-mailing a song to a friend, transferring a piece of land is incredibly difficult. This is why we have contracts, and property rights, but we don't really worry too much about the one getting severed from the other. With online file sharing, and with the ease with which we bend bits to our will, the integrity of metadata, and its persistence, becomes all the more important.
But you know what else is easily transmittable? The internet representation of ourselves. Any modern digital native understands that we exist on several planes simultaneously—meatspace and cyberspace, to use previously coined terms. In the meatspace, our identity is inextricably bound up with our physical self. But in cyberspace, we range far and wide, tied to no particular time or place, identified only by our transactions and interactions. And in that latter regime, all we are is the data we're shuffling around, and the metadata associated with it is no more and no less ourselves.
Which takes me back to the Dick Hardt video at the end of this post. How do you know who you are on the internet? How do you ensure the integrity of that metadata? It's a difficult problem, but it's also an important one.
