licensing-brainstorming

Licensing Brainstorming

The very beginning.

See licensing for background.

Discussion

Set of classes pertinent to supporting licensing and attribution requirements and complements. These classes could be used at webpage level or within relevant microformats, e.g., media-info.

The first column may be too URL-centric, see notes for parent work, may apply to others.

Overly descriptive strawman not intended to conform with any convention	Existing class(es); source	Notes
work title	fn; hCard	See examples#title
attribution name, creator?	author; hAtom, hcard	Might be a vcard with fn, may also be an organization See examples#attribution
attribution url	url; hCard	An author might have a url, should this be taken as the attribution url? If a work has a url, should it be taken as the attribution url? See examples#link
donation url	payment; rel-payment offer; hListing	How to disambiguate from commercial licensing and purchase? See examples#donation
commercial licensing url	payment; rel-payment sell, offer; hListing copyright; HTML LinkType	How to disambiguate from donation and purchase? See examples#commercial
purchase url	payment; rel-payment sell, offer; hListing	How to disambiguate from donation and commercial licensing? See examples#purchase
content hash	checksum, sha1; hash-examples	See examples#hash
provenance url		See examples#provenance
parent work url?, derivitave-source		Should this be a url? Maybe it should be a TBD "media" microformat which may be otherwise described. See examples#derivative Probably should be a URL -- a uf can have a #URL if it has an id.
attribution, copied-source		Shows where the media was immediately copied from (not necessarily the same as its original source). Has the same challenges as derivative-source. Perhaps use the approach loosely outlined in Attribution Challenges
source		Like 'copied-source' but points to the original source.

Attribution Challenges

Tags dealing with specifying sources and tracking a piece of media's path through the Web (any of the -source tags above) are a little ambiguous in terms of what they can reference. For instance when specifying a derivative work it could be from another image on the Internet, in which case an URL would be appropriate, or it could be a quotation from a magazine or other "real" world source where an URL doesn't really work. Perhaps we can encourage the content of these 'media source' tags to be one of the following:

Media source type	Format	Notes
Internet source	An URL
Person	hcard
Publication (book, magazine, etc.)	citation	Citation appears to be heavily weighed towards academia but it looks like it should work for most purposes
Film/Video	??	I'm not sure about this one. Would citation stretch over visual media? Perhaps media-info?

Strawman example

Perhaps there should be an 'attribution' class which might hint that a fn or url should be used for attribution? Something like (webpage scope):

<a class="url attribution fn" href="http://example.com">My First Cookbook</a>
<div class="author vcard">
  <div class="fn attribution">J Doe</div>
</div>
<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/">(cc)</a>
<a rel="payment" href="http://paypal.com/...">don't let me starve</a>

Strawman example for media

Note the media-info is not even defined yet, this is not even strawman quality.

<div class="media">
  <img class="url attribution mediaitem" src="http://example.com/cake.jpg"/>
  <span class="fn">Picture of a giant cake</span>
  <div class="author vcard">
    <div class="fn attribution">J Doe</div>
  </div>
  <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/">(cc)</a>
  <a rel="payment" href="http://paypal.com/...">don't let me <s>starve</s>eat cake</a>
  <a rel="payment" href="http://artdelivery.example">buy this pic, framed</a>
  <a rel="payment" href="http://photoclearing.example">get commercial rights</a>
  ...
</div>

Todo

• Answer questions above and those not posed
• Discover and fix gratuitous problems with the above
• Examples working with media-info

Creative Commons Vocab

Creative Commons has an RDF vocabulary which may be suitable for reuse. Here is an example using the Creative Commons vocab. It goes a long way to meeting all the stated requirements.

<div class="License">
  <a rev="license" href="http://example.org/work">The work</a> is licensed under
  the <a rel="legalcode" href="http://example.org/foo">Foo Licence</a>. 
  Summary: it permits <abbr title="DerivativeWorks" class="permits">derivative
  works</abbr> but requires <abbr title="Attribution" class="requires"
  >attribution</abbr>. The credit to give when reusing the work is "<span 
  class="vcard"><a href="http://tobyinkster.co.uk" class="fn url
  attributionName" rel="attributionURL">Toby Inkster</a></span>".
</div>

The microformat could use the following terms:

• License {1} (root class name)
  • legalcode ? (rel value, not class)
  • morePermissions * (rel value, not class)
  • permits * ("Reproduction" | "Distribution" | "DerivativeWorks" | "HighIncomeNationUse" | "Sharing")
  • requires * ("CopyrightNotices" | "Attribution" | "ShareAlike" | "SourceCode")
  • prohibits * ("CommercialUse")
  • jurisdiction * (text | hCard | adr)
  • attributionName ?
  • attributionURL ? (rel value, not class)
  • deprecatedOn ? (ISO date)

The license linked to using rel="legalcode" (if any) should be taken to be the definitive license. When such a license is present, the "permits", "requires", "prohibits" and "jurisdiction" classes are taken to be merely advisory. When no "legalcode" license is linked to, these classes are definitive.

rel-license SHOULD be used to link from the work to the license (an ID attribute on the license will help). A license MAY link back to the work using rev="license", but forward links are preferred.

As an extension to the creative commons vocabulary (which focuses on open-source-like licenses) a payment URL MAY be linked to using an anchor element simultaneously carrying class="requires" and rel="payment". Example:

<a class="requires" rel="payment" href="https://payment.example.org">buy</a>

If rel-payment is used without a class of "requires", then the link is taken to be an optional payment link - i.e. a donation.

see also

• licensing
• licensing-examples
• licensing-formats
• licensing-brainstorming