Coverage of the SES San Jose conference continues at WebProNews Videos.  Stay with WebProNews for more notes and videos from the event this week.

Gary Milner, who’s the global marketing director of Lenovo‘s Interactive and Teleweb Marketing division, was the first presenter to speak.  He brought up the old John Wanamaker quote about wasted advertising money, and emphasized that businesses need to start working towards attribution models now in order to make better marketing decisions in the future.

Robin Smith, the global search marketing manager at Life Technologies, then stepped up to introduce a couple of points about the complexity of doing so.  After doing some investigating, she found that her company had missed roughly 80 percent of the touch points leading to conversions.

Next, Mark Grote, who’s a senior search manager at Microsoft, issued some statements about his company’s stance on last click attribution.  He claimed that search overdelivers and is over-credited in terms of campaign performance.  SEO ties more to the awareness and consideration phase of a purchase than to sales, according to Grote.

Finally, Adam Goldberg, ClearSaleing‘s chief innovation officer, wrapped up the session’s formal presentations.  He made the point that banners can be extremely useful in influencing the types of searches that are done.  Otherwise, Goldberg stated that the last click model is not as effective as the attribution model, and that you can’t do attribution just by guessing.

Scouring sites like Flickr, where amateur and professional photographers alike share their work, has become a standard means of finding just the right image. So it’s not particularly surprising that Virgin Mobile Australia took the same approach in its effort to find images to support a print-based advertising campaign. Among the images they found was one of 16-year-old Alison Chang, taken by a friend at a church event and posted to the friend’s Flickr account. Seeing the Creative Common license, Virtin Mobil’s marketers grabbed the image and splashed it all over bus stops with taglines like, “Dump your Pen Friend” and “Free Text Virgin to Virgin.”

Now, Chang and her family are suing Virgin Mobil and Creative Commons, not because Virgin failed to pay for the rights to Chang’s image, but because using the image is a violation of her privacy rights. (You can watch a CNN interview with the Chang’s attorney here.)

On its surface, the lawsuit is a cautionary tale for organizations who view Flickr as an archive of royalty-free images. Lawrence Lessig—the Stanford professor, Constitutional law attorney, and intellectual power behind Creative Commons—offers a deeper dive into the issue (although he is constrained from commenting on the merits of the suit). In a post to his blog, Lessig raises a number of points:

…this case does again highlight the free culture function of the Noncommercial term in the CC license. Many from the free software community would prefer culture be licensed as freely as free software—enabling both commercial and commercial use…But this case shows something about why that objective is not as simple as it seems. I doubt that any court would find the photographer in this case had violated any right of privacy merely by posting a photograph like this on Flickr. Nor would any court, in my view, find a noncommercial use of a photograph like this violative of any right of privacy. And fianlly, as the world is now, while many might resist the idea of Virgin using a photograph of theirs for free…most in the net community would be perfectly find with noncommercial use of a photograph by others within the net community.

The Noncommercial license tries to match these expectations. It tries to authorize and reuse—not within a commercial economy, but within a sharing economy.

I urge you to read Lessig’s entire post, where he points out that the Creative Commons has been effective and that the organization has taken pains to make the meanings of the various licenses easy to understand (easier, he points out, than Congress does with copyrights). The suit, however, shows CreativeCommons has some way yet to go. And the distinction between commercial and noncommercial licenses does not address permissions “for a puboicity right, or a right of privacy” (a point reiterated by Ryan Zhel, the Changs’ attorney, who says the suit is about privacy, not commercial vs. non-commercial distinctions).

We in the social media community embrace and extoll the virtues of Creative Commons licenses, but this lawsuit seems to show that they are not a panacea. It’ll probably be up to the courts, ultimately, to decide who has rights to your image once it escapes into the social media space, with or without your knowledge or consent.

Not surprisingly, there’s plenty of commentary on the story.

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So where did this $9.99 copy of Everyone’s an Expert (About Something) come from? It appears to be a company called BN Publishing, which has an eBay store as well. Godin’s book available in print form, distributed and promoted by Amazon, was news to him too.

"I didn’t authorize this book to be published," said Godin. "I have no idea who the publisher is and I certainly didn’t ask Amazon to email anyone [about it]."

The only problem is that he sort of did authorize it, indirectly. He published the book under a Creative Commons license – the wrong one if you don’t want something published without you. The faithful blogospheric commentators out there have highlighted two key differences in CC licenses.

The CC license Godin published under is labeled Attribution 2.5, stating:

You are free:

To copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
To make derivative works

Under the following conditions:

Attribution. You must give the original author credit.

For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.

Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.

There is another CC license called Attribution-NonCommerical 2.5, which allows anyone to share or remix the work as long as it is not for commercial purposes.

BN Publishing knew this. Apparently, it’s what they do.

"A quick dig this morning on the BNPublishing website seems to show their business model as taking non-rights-protected works and packaging them up for easy sale," said Christopher Carfi, co-founder of Cerado, Inc. "For example, they are also selling titles such as The Art of War and the like on their site."

While commentators sympathize with Godin, the general consensus out there is that he, pretty much, asked for it.

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The decision to open is easier for vendors than it was just a few years ago because of the common practice of Mozilla Public License-based licenses by companies such as SugarCRM, Zimbra, Alfresco, Scalix and about 10 others. MPL is the most popular OSI license and it allows for extensions (MPL section 6.1 says “However, You may include an additional document offering the additional rights described in Section 3.5.” Section 3.5 ensure that the modifications must apply equally to every developer or contributor.).

Good thing too, because in my humble opinion no other licenses are a fit for commercial open source web applications.

For Socialtext, we made three modifications:

1. Attribution: We believe that attribution provides positive incentives for creativity and innovation, as witnessed by the success of Creative Commons attribution licenses. Trademark is attribution. We require the display of the project’s mark within the UI, not just the code, with a link back to the community that contributes to it.
2. Network Use: Delivering an application over HTTP should the same as compiling, burning and distributing on a CD. If you distribute over the network, you should share your contributions with the community. See this wiki page for more details.
3. Trademark Use: Section 6.3 says that if you make a modification to the license, you cannot use Mozilla trademarks within the license. So we called it Socialtext Public License, but we can reference MPL publicly or in the license expressly to point out the first two differences between SPL and MPL.

We put SPL out into the world after a lot of research and conversation, but decided to be open to granting more liberal rights in the future if demanded by the community. More importantly, while SPL is consistent with the Open Source Definition, we firmly believe in the mission of the Open Source Initiative and desire to submit to their process for sake of license proliferation.

While it is inside baseball for some, David Berlind has a very well researched post that asks, are companies using MPL extensions are abusing the term Open Source? I’ve spoken with David about this several times. I think his article provides a balanced view of those who believe the licenses are OSI compliant and those who do not. I’d also like to highlight OSI board member Danese Cooper’s blog post on attribution.

But unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to talk with David in a little while, as I would have highlighted that Socialtext submitted a memo to the OSI board for consideration on November 14th — proposing a Generic Attribution Provision. I’ve shared the attribution memo on a wiki page, where you can find additional background information on the issue and the proposal to resolve it through a standard attribution clause that OSI could certify for any OSI license. This structure would be similar to how Creative Commons enables attribution as an option.

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Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a group memory.

He also writes Ross Mayfield’s Weblog which focuses on markets, technology and musings.

For a major enterprise, this venture contains a degree of Risk:

The probability that an investment or venture will make a loss or not make the returns expected. This probability can be measured. There are many different types of risk including basis risk, country or sovereign risk, credit risk, currency risk, economic risk, inflation risk, liquidity risk, market or systematic risk, political risk, settlement risk, systemic risk and translation risk.

The Glossary was initially based upon their second edition, which is available for purchase. Then they baked it out with an internal soft launch. The value of this approach is you prototype in private while building a community of employees prior to launch. The opposite of the Wikitorial debacle. Content is licensed as Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial, a fundamental underpinning of the social contract, and they have adopted Wikipedia’s Neutral Point of View and other values.

A well hedged position. So what is the potential reward? Reuters is putting itself at the center of it’s industry in cultivating shared language. The renewable resource becomes a focus of attention that can be directed in respect of the social contract. The community that may form, their greatest challenge going forward, could contribute tangible word of mouth benefits. This is community marketing, people — an essential move as trust and influence shifts from institutions to peers. And very significant institutions are starting to get it.

Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a group memory.

He also writes Ross Mayfield’s Weblog which focuses on markets, technology and musings.