I think Andy's point about working with standardized licenses is excellent.
Especially good leverage points for search and selection would be obtained
from a menu of standard acronyms representing those licenses.
-John
--- On Mon, 3 Mar 2003, Andy Powell wrote:
Date: Mon, 3 Mar 2003 23:45:26 +0000
From: Andy Powell <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Creative Commons
The Creative Commons (CC) have developed a set of standard licences for
people to use in order to explicitly indicate that their creative works
are available for others to build upon and share.
http://creativecommons.org/
I think it will be extrememly valuable for us to work with CC to agree
mechanisms for encoding CC licences in simple and qualified DC metadata.
CC seems to have opted for an RDF approach. See
http://creativecommons.org/learn/technology/metadata/implement
for details. I don't disagree with this approach in pronciple, but I have
some concerns about the details of what they have done. And I think it is
important to agree how we should encode the same information in plain XML
and HTML <meta> tags.
My concern is that CC have defined dc:rights to be 'The cc:Agent who holds
the copyright on the resource'. This is somewhat at odds with our
definition of dc:rights because a simple personal or corporate 'name' is
not really 'Information about rights held in and over the resource'.
I would prefer to see dc:rights being used to carry the URI for the
chosen CC licence. If necessary, dc:rights can be repeated to carry a
human readable 'copyright' string, e.g.
<meta name="DC.rights"
content="(c) University of Bath, 2003">
<meta name="DC.rights"
content="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0">
or in XML
<dc:rights>(c) University of Bath, 2003</dc:rights>
<dc:rights xsi:type="dcterms:URI">http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0</dc:rights>
or in RDF/XML
<dc:rights>(c) University of Bath, 2003</dc:rights>
<dc:rights rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0"
/>
I also wonder if the content at the CC licence URIs should be plain text,
HTML (as now), RDF/XML or ODRL/XML (or some other form of rights markup
language) - or if content negotiatioon could be used to determine what is
served at those URIs.
What do others think? (Detailed technical discussion might be better
moved to the dc-architecture list!).
Overall, I think it is important that we (DCMI) enter into some
constructive dialogue with the Creative Commons.
Andy
--
Distributed Systems, UKOLN, University of Bath, Bath, BA2 7AY, UK
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/a.powell +44 1225 383933
Resource Discovery Network http://www.rdn.ac.uk/
