http://action.one.org

Love the links and info. A couple brief comments about your blog:

The background makes reading anything here pain.

Tab order is messed in that tabbing from Name to Email to Website to Comment jumps to the top of the page on tabbing from Website to Comment. That is all, have a superior day.

The animated favicon only works in Firefox, I think. It is just a standard animated .gif that I created using the free Persistence of Vision ray tracer. The animated gif is here . In order to make it my favicon I just add the following line to my HTML header:

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”/images/favicon.gif” type=”image/x-icon” />

Firefox then uses the animated gif as the favicon for my blog.

First of all, the embeddable content would have to be a little different than what is currently available on mormon.org. The videos, or other distributable objects, would have to be self-contained presentations, rather than page-context dependent. As such, each would provide context as well as contain its own copyright notice and attribution (with a link back to mormon.org).

Secondly, while the context in which they are embedded is outside of the church’s control, the content of the embeddable objects is still being served from the church’s mormon.org server. That means the church maintains control of the content that is actually delivered to the user’s browser for the embedded portion of the page, including copyright displays and attribution.

The church might also consider releasing the objects under a Creative Commons license, probably an Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

With those considerations, I don’t think that copyright will be much of a problem.

While I agree that we should be concerned about misuse by antagonistic websites, I don’t think that providing embeddable content makes the kinds of misuse you cite much more likely than they already are.

Take for instance your example of a parody that plays side-by-side with an embedded video. Any website owner who wants to do this can already do so by using an iframe tag with the src attribute pointed to the original video on the mormon.org, or they can do as I have done in my example above and use the view source function of their browser on the mormon.org website, and with only minor modification to add http://www.mormon.org/ to the beginning of the filenames, copy and paste the embedded the video directly into their website. Even if they aren’t that savvy, the can simply post their parody on their website with a link back to the original on mormon.org and achieve for all intents and purposes the same effect. So providing embeddable objects really doesn’t increase the chances of this kind of antagonism any more than having the videos on the web in the first place already does.

As for your second example of a video taken out of context and then attacked as a strawman by an antagonistic website, the same is true as with the parody. They can already do this if they want to. Providing embeddable objects that are self-contained presentations, as discussed earlier would actually provide improved protection against this kind of abuse. Currently if I copy and paste the embedded video from mormon.org, as in the examples in my post, the video has no context and so it is easier to abuse in this way than an embeddable object would be.

The church would probably want to include a disclaimer on its embeddable content portal something like this: Websites featuring embedded content from Mormon.org in no way represent the church in any official capacity neither does embedded content from mormon.org that appears on third party sites imply church endorsement or approval of those sites or any of their other content.

If I am right about this, then embeddable content from mormon.org would provide great benefits without appreciably increasing the chances for misuse.

Of course these are also issues with text, but video costs more to produce, can have a bigger impact, and might feel more authoritative (whether in context or out). So… I think the risk is bigger. Still-it’s an interesting idea.