dc:rights and CC resolution

Mike Linksvayer ml at creativecommons.org
Mon Feb 16 21:35:00 EST 2004


There's a proposal at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcmi/dc-rights/ 
that would resolve controversy over CC's use of dc:rights by introducing 
a dc:rightsHolder term.

The problem is that CC uses dc:rights to denote an agent who holds the 
copyright on the resource.  See 
<http://creativecommons.org/technology/metadata/implement>.  This is 
somewhat in conflict with dc:rights, which supports the following two 
requirements, from the above proposal:

     * provide a simple human-readable statement of who holds rights 
over a resource
     * support simple (i.e. potentially ambiguous) searches of the form 
"find all resources where an entity that is named using a simple string 
is likely to be a rights holder"

(The definition of dc:rights at 
http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/ is much less precise -- 
"Information about rights held in and over the resource.")

Anyway, dcterms:rightsHolder, assuming the proposal is accepted, maps 
directly to CC's current use of dc:rights.  As soon as the proposal is 
accepted, I plan to begin recommending (and emitting from 
<http://creativecommons.org/license/>) dcterms:rightsHolder in place of 
our current dc:rights use.

The other part of the proposal, dcterms:license, need only be reflected 
in the CC schema.  See 
<http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wa.exe?A2=ind0402&L=dc-usage&P=2757> 
for both changes I propose spelled out.

-- 
   Mike Linksvayer
   http://creativecommons.org/learn/aboutus/people#21



More information about the cc-metadata mailing list