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cc-devel - Re: [cc-devel] How to deal with multiple content items & possible different licenses?

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Subject: Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

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  • From: Peter Liljenberg <peter AT commonsmachinery.se>
  • To: burobjorn AT gmail.com
  • Cc: "cc-devel AT lists.ibiblio.org" <cc-devel AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-devel] How to deal with multiple content items & possible different licenses?
  • Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2013 18:17:12 +0100

On 20 November 2013 17:19, BjornW <burobjorn AT gmail.com> wrote:
Btw I'm not sure how to use the same warning in RDF in such a way
that parsers are also made aware of this (not sure if this would be even
possible given that this might be something part of an individual
parser' implementation).

With the risk of misunderstanding you, here's some thoughts on this based on my experiments with using RDFa on web pages automatically (see http://commonsmachinery.se/labs/ for runnable prototypes)

RDFa allows you to identify which object you are describing, so you can describe the different licenses for multiple resources on a page.  The ccREL guide has an example of this: http://labs.creativecommons.org/2011/ccrel-guide/#Multiple

That example is about an individual image on a web page.  If we consider the case of a post on a blog I can see three alternatives.  In this example, the post has the URL http://myblog/guest-post/ while the blog as a whole has the URL http://myblog/.

Alternative 1: just describe the post license.  On the page http://myblog/guest-post/, you would just have something like:

<div about="">
   Post author: <span property="cc:attributionName">Mr. Guest Author</span><br>
   Post license: <a href=""http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">CC BY-SA 3.0</a>
</div>

The about="" is implied, and can be skipped if that makes things easier.


Alternative 2: describe the license for both this post and the blog as a whole.  This can in the easiest case be done by including the block above, and then an additional block about the blog as a whole:

<div about="http://myblog/">
  Blog license (except where noted): <a href=""http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/">CC BY 3.0</a>
</div>

The risk with this approach is that it is not clear to an RDFa user what license applies to header images etc.  If that is really important, perhaps the best approach is to include a license block such significant page items too.



Alternative 3: identify the section of the web page that's the guest blog post.  While I think this could be a really good way to provide a lot of information to tools, it is probably still pretty experimental. This requires that the plugin can mark the block that contains the blog post itself, e.g.:

<div id="#post-4711">
  Hi, this is my guest post about ...
</div>

<div about="#post-4711">
   Post author: <span property="cc:attributionName">Mr. Guest Author</span><br>
   Post license: <a href=""http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">CC BY-SA 3.0</a>
</div>

And then the standard blog license block, now about the page as a whole again:

<div about="">
  Blog license (except where noted): <a href=""http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/">CC BY 3.0</a>
</div>


On balance, I think alternative 2 is the best trade-off in a production tool here and now, although it adds a bit of complexity to the plugin.

Regards,
  Peter Liljenberg, Commons Machinery



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