Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[amit sethi <amit.pureenergy AT gmail.com>]

Basic premise: To be able to find licenses for a remote object. 
The idea is to write a HTTP header spec. Something like X-License. This header would provide me information about what license that particular object is available under.
Tasks and Deliverable:

1) To write the specs which can cover extensibly licenses for objects available a particular URL.

Taking an example of a blog entry


Sending request   

 Connected to chasingframes.co.cc (76.191.252.49) port 80 (#0)
 GET /blog/2009/03/21/site-colors-and-logo/ HTTP/1.1
 User-Agent: curl/7.18.0 (i486-pc-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.18.0 OpenSSL/0.9.8g zlib/1.2.3.3 libidn/1.1
 Host: chasingframes.co.cc
 Accept: */*
 
Response 

 HTTP/1.0 200 OK
 Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2009 06:17:56 GMT
 Server: WSGIServer/0.1 Python/2.5.1
 Vary: Accept-Language, Cookie
 Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
 Content-Language: en-us
 X-Pingback: http://chasingframes.co.cc/xmlrpc/
 Set-Cookie:  sessionid=7c6c8e6c3cf4818bab89194da12c4840; expires=Thu, 09-Apr-2009 06:17:56 GMT; Max-Age=1209600; Path=/
 X-License: CC-BY; http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode; http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/3.0/88x31.png

 This extends the idea of licensing to include arbitary remote objects (URLs). So youtube main page could be copyrighted to google whereas user uploaded video could be CC licensed. The X-License is just a priliminary thought, I would be interested to know from the list, what all information should be embedded if such a header were to exist.


2)  Once the specs have been defined, I would like to do a sample implemenation using django.Essentially this can be broken down into three steps

• Adding license attribute to Fields in Django. As a starting point FileField and ImageField seem to be a good starting point.
• Django middleware to parse this tag and generating appropriate header for the object.
• Additional work in this middleware for handling /media files in django.
  

3) I would also like to implement liblicense IO module for reading this spec. 

Please comment on the possibility of this being a Gsoc project and suggestions for improvement.  

-- 
A-M-I-T S|S