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  • From: Jim Eng <jimeng AT umich.edu>
  • To: cc-devel AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [cc-devel] Finding a license description
  • Date: Fri, 13 Feb 2009 09:36:17 -0500

I am looking at the license metadata from the licenses directory of the liblicense-0.8.1 zip file. I'm wondering about the logic for finding a license description. The metadata defines 376 licenses, and only a few of them have "dc:description" elements. Those with descriptions are the simple licenses ("by", "nc", "nd", "sa"). The composite licenses (e.g. "by-nc-nd", "by-nc-sa", "by-nc", "by-nd-nc", "by-nd", "by-sa", "nc-sa") do not contain definition elements.

Suppose I want to display an plain-English (or plain-French or plain- Chinese or whatever locale my user requires) description of a "by-nc- nd" license for a particular jurisdiction. I would start with the most recent version of that license for the jurisdiction (2.5 in most cases or 3.0 if the jurisdiction is the USA) and find that it does not have a description. So do I then look for the three licenses ("by", "nc" and "nd") and combine their descriptions to get the description of "by-nc-nd"?

If the answer to the last question is "yes", here's a follow-up question: It looks like the most recent general description of "by" is 3.0, but most (or all?) of the licenses for separate jurisdictions have descriptions in version 2.5. Which should we use -- the description for the preferred locale for the general 3.0 "by" license or the description for the preferred locale for the specific jurisdiction's 2.5 "by" license? For "nc" and "nd", do I use the 1.0 version unless the jurisdiction is "jp", in which case, do I use the 2.0 description?

The metadata in the license files seems to be silent on the question of how to find an appropriate description unless it's included in the license itself (or in a license referenced in an "isReplacedBy" tag or a "source" tag). By that I mean that the metadata for version 3.0 of the "by-nc-nd" license makes no reference to any prior versions or to the "by", "nc" or "nd" licenses. That makes me wonder if the plain- language description for a particular locale and jurisdition is defined somewhere else?

Thanks for any suggestions.

Jim








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