[cc-community] [asheesh at creativecommons.org: Re: A comment from Noah Slater]
Parker Higgins
parkerhiggins at gmail.com
Thu May 15 13:46:03 EDT 2008
At risk of making this a punctuation list, I should point out that in
addition to their standard, separate-two-independent-clauses function,
semicolons are sometimes correctly used in place of commas in lists to
separate items if the items themselves are "complicated." You might say
"I went to the baseball game with Alice; Bob, Angela's father; Carl, a
guy we met on the street; and Dave." The semicolons indicate that there
are only four parties, and not the seven you could otherwise construe.
With regard to Noah's comment about adjectives, a list of adjectives
could also be constructed this way, but it would probably sound fairly
stilted.
</grammar>
I think there is also a question of the "modularity" of each license.
When you apply an Attribution :: Share-Alike :: Noncommercial license
(to use an arbitrary punctuation mark) are you really applying three
different licenses that are all working together? In that case, I think
the semicolons make more sense. But if every combination is considered
its own license, so there are not four nonexclusive license options but
four factorial, the semicolon makes less sense.
Gee, I hope that was constructive, sorry if I rambled a bit.
Best,
Parker
Noah Slater wrote:
> On Mon, May 12, 2008 at 12:53:47PM +0100, Robert Atwood wrote:
>
>> Attribution; Share-Alike; Non-Commercial; etc.
>>
>
> I don't think this is correct usage of the semicolon. The words here are being
> used as adjectives to describe the licence, in no other situation have I seen
> semicolons used to separate multiple adjectives.
>
> The other messages no this thread seemed to suggest that the long form of the
> licence name should match the abbreviated form, but I think this is
> misguided. The use of hyphens in the abbreviated form is pretty standard but the
> rules of style for fully expanded names should be considered a separate matter.
>
> I do not see the need for any punctuation between adjectives in the expanded
> licence names and cannot think of any "prior art" for this style.
>
> Does anyone have any idea how to take this forward and get something changed
> because despite what is eventually agreed upon, consistency across the licences
> is important.
>
> Thanks,
>
>
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