Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Peter Miller <millerp AT canb.auug.org.au>]

On Wed, 2007-09-12 at 21:49 -0700, Jon Phillips wrote: 
> Cool...Peter, what are you thinking now?

I think I'll commit the patch as is.  It rounds out the API nicely, and
doesn't seem to get anybody's dander up.


At the risk of confusing things with more than one issue per email, here
are the immediate things I'd like to do:

(1) in liblicense

I've been looking at implementing my "license intersection" function.
It seems straight forward, now that I'm more familiar with the code.  

But this raises a problem: what if the intersection is the empty set?
I.e. no rights at all.  Is there scope for come kind of "on the fly"
license URI that can be queried via the API, etc, but never actually
exists as a URL you could view with a web browser, as you can for CC
attributes URIs and rights URIs.  (Probably the same thing: what if the
intersection of the permitted rights is valid but isn't a CC license
combination?)

(2) in icon-compositor

In trying to be a conscientious web citizen, I want to be able to
display copyright notices with icons, as well as the license.

But this raises a problem: there is no place to host copyright
information within liblicense.  This concerns me because I could wind up
with not one but *two* files alongside each image: the one for the
license information, and the one for the copyright information.

It gets worse: when I need to say "(C) me, derived from a work (C) Fred
Bloggs" how do I?  We don't have this problem in source code, we just
add our notice to the list in the header comment, right next to the
license comment.  They belong together in source code - shouldn't they
belong together in images?



One more thing: I feel that the CC site (http://creativecommons.org/ns)
is very unclear on the difference between reproduction and distribution.
Is distribution == reproduction * N, where n > 0 or n > 1 or n > 42
or ...?  Surely I can make as many copies on my laptop as I like, or is
there a problem there, too?  Is distribution different than
reproduction?  Is distribution different than publication?  I.e. giving
a copy to someone vs making available to world on web site (the
difference between personally handing out fliers vs leaving them on a
table for people to pick up as they walk past).  I've been wrestling
with copyright for too many decades to be happy with the nebulous
wording at the CC web site (and, yes, I get it that the answer varies by
jurisdiction, I just feel the words could be much much less vague).


Regards
Peter Miller <millerp AT canb.auug.org.au>
/\/\*        http://miller.emu.id.au/pmiller/

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