Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Jim Eng <jimeng AT umich.edu>]

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