[uf-new] rel=license scoping and hAudio

[Tantek Celik]

Manu, Martin, in brief, please do not propose/introduce/suggest new formats (hlicense, rel copyright etc) without at a minimum checking the wiki for work in progress regarding the limitations of rel-license.

http://microformats.org/wiki/license

Thanks,

Tantek

-----Original Message-----
From: Manu Sporny <msporny at digitalbazaar.com>

Date: Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:44:11 
To: For discussion of new microformats.<microformats-new at microformats.org>
Subject: Re: [uf-new] rel=license scoping and hAudio


Toby A Inkster wrote:
> With rel-license scoping has potentially major legal ramifications.
> Essentially it means that any rel=license link found needs to be
> manually checked to determine exactly what the licence applies to. And
> if one needs to manually inspect a page to determine its licence, then
> rel=license is adding no value.

This is a very good point, Toby. It is an argument against using
rel="license" in the current version of hAudio since the semantics do
not match up with what is intended. Namely:

"By adding rel="license" to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the
destination of that hyperlink is a license for the current page."[1]

However, to give a counter-point, Creative Commons notes that
rel="license" should be used to specify what music a particular work is
licensed under:

http://creativecommons.org/license/music

Their approach has the musical work(s) described on a page as the only
content on that page, so rel="license" makes a little more sense in
their use case. This would also make sense in the hAudio case, but has a
very high probability of abuse.

The XHTML vocabulary also defines rel="license" as applying to the
current document and not to resources in the document.

http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab#license

Keep in mind that this is a non-issue in RDFa since you always have a
subject, which is why it is supported in Audio RDFa[2].

If we do want to specify the license for Microformatted objects in the
future, we should pick something else, like rel="hlicense" to specify
the relationship between a Microformat object and it's license.

However, hAudio does not have enough examples of specifying the license
to warrant this addition to the Microformat.

-- manu

[1] http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-license#Abstract
[2] http://purl.org/media/audio
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