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  • From: Jim Eng <jimeng AT umich.edu>
  • To: Nathan Yergler <nathan AT creativecommons.org>
  • Cc: cc-devel AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [cc-devel] Finding a license description
  • Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 22:36:27 -0500

Hi Nathan,

Thanks for your replies. The sum of the parts is fine. It doesn't have to be a single sentence. But we're looking for a short paragraph that describes the license. If we get that by concatenating descriptions of the various parts, so be it.

Jim



On Feb 24, 2009, at 4:55 PM, Nathan Yergler wrote:

Hi Jim --

So the problem here is that the RDF you're looking at was generated
programmatically from existing systems. One of our ongoing
goals/challenges is to make reality match what we claim; that is, that
the RDF is the canonical representation of the license. I'm happy to
report that we're going to be putting some directed effort into this
in the next month or so, but I expect there will be some rough spots.
Like this one. The reason there's no description for the "compound"
licenses is that the descriptions you're seeing are actually for the
particular license elements (ie, "BY" or "NC"), not the entire
license. I suppose to make the RDF match reality we should purge all
of those dc:description elements, since calling them the description
of the license is potentially inaccurate.

It might be useful to find out what you expect a reasonable value of
dc:description for a License would be. If it's a one sentence summary
of the license, I'm not sure we have an analogous "feature" right now
on the site.

Nathan


On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 6:36 AM, Jim Eng <jimeng AT umich.edu> wrote:
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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