And finally, and most importantly to me, doing that would make me unable to share the files with others; sometimes I *shudder* forward it along to someone else, or *horrors* burn them to CD and give them to someone, and say “listen, and go check this place out”. I’d be in violation of your copyright if I did that w/o the CC license. (And if you’re going to try to rig up some Frankenstein license that allows emailing [occasionally,whatever THAT would mean] and burning, but not serving, then I maintain you’re just trying to make things complicated!)

Part of your problem is the inherent problem of trying to fit the old-world advertising model to the Web. Go read podcastalley.org for an example; Free Talk Live is now the “#2 most popular podcast” (and was actually #1 for awhile this morning, by my eye), due to the concerted efforts of a bunch of people who want (among other things) to be able to “show” advertisers (other other Old World media types) how popular they are. I have never HEARD of those yahoos, and it’s apparent they’re just gaming the system. Likewise, one could game any “listener count by download” system; one could game it either way, in fact…to deflate or inflate your numbers. Metrics seem great at first glance…but if they don’t mean what you think they mean, they’re really worse than useless.

Don’t take this the wrong way, Doug; but I can say that I’ll start REMOVING my links to IT Conversations if you restrict the licenses to non-CC. And I’m willing to be that some others will, and that you may even lose some shows. (I’m emailing one of your hosts immediately, in fact, to let him know.) PLEASE try to not make a decision rashly.

Thanks for everything. Please don’t take this ramblefest the wrong way, but I’d hate to see you bolt a buggy-whip holder to the side of your brand new car for the sake of a bunch of clueless advertisers. I realize they have power…but try to give them what they WANT, not what they’re ASKING FOR.

Thanks again!

On the other hand, might there be other venues, perhaps offline, that are enabled by the CC. These doors may be closed by a more restrictive license. Suppose I’m a teacher wanting to provide these “conservations” for study to my students, for example.

Might there be a third (technical) alternative. If its other “servers” that mask your numbers then what about the idea of offering free downloadable html snippets that “make it easy” to do “the right thing”. They could, perhaps, link to a badge pulled from your site that would let you count views and/or downloads (even from other sites).

You could fall back on the standard copyright and require this badging or you could rely upon and encourage the good will of others by making the “reuse” just a bit easier while supporting your underlying objectives.

I know this is a little more work, and that you can’t call it a CC license at that point, but you can do what they do, satisfy your needs, and give them a little “link-juice” besides.

Why not simply state that since traffic to the site is part of the business model to make further recordings possible, conversations may not be posted on other sites without prior authorisation. Deep linking is encouraged.