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cc-devel - Re: [cc-devel] Finding a license description

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Subject: Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

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  • From: Nathan Yergler <nathan AT creativecommons.org>
  • To: Jim Eng <jimeng AT umich.edu>
  • Cc: cc-devel AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [cc-devel] Finding a license description
  • Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2009 13:55:39 -0800

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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