[uf-discuss] rel-license: what does the license apply to? (open issue revisited)

[Angus McIntyre]

I'm in the process of adding 'rel="license"' in the relevant places on
blip.tv, a video-sharing site, and I've run squarely into the 'open issue'
raised by Evan on 2006-04-07 (in the wiki). Namely, there's no obvious way
to specify that the license applies to a content element on a page - a
picture, a video - rather than the page as a whole.

About all I can think of is that a second rel value is needed, so you'd
have something like:

  <link rel="license"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/" />
  <link rel="licensed" href="http://example.com/myvideo.flv" />
  <link rel="licensed" href="http://example.com/myvideo.mov" />

The interpretation would be:

   If one or more hyperlinks with 'rel=licensed' are found, the items
referenced
   are covered by the license (but the page as a whole is not).

   if no hyperlinks with 'rel=licensed' are found, the license refers to
the page as a whole.

This has the advantage of only complicating things a little ... but it
also has the flaw that it can't deal with the case where you have multiple
content items covered by different licenses on the same page (which is a
not unlikely scenario).

I seem to remember one of the microformats has a poorly-understood
algorithm for determining the scope of a declaration; could this be
reapplied here?

Angus