Developer discussion for Creative Commons technology and tools

[Mike Linksvayer <ml AT gondwanaland.com>]

On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 2:50 AM, Peter Liljenberg
<peter AT commonsmachinery.se> wrote:
> I understand that cc:Work and cc:License are separate, I'm really asking how
> they relate to each others. Apologies for taking shortcuts in the notation.
>
> My interpretation was that if a cc:Work linked to a cc:License with
> cc:require cc:Attribution, that put a very specific meaning on the
> properties of the cc:Work. It appears from the responses here that that
> isn't true.

"Nothing is true, everything is permitted." :)

> Is this closer to the intention of ccREL:
>
> 1) A tool can only use the properties of a cc:License to provide general
> information to a user, e.g. "this work requires attribution, for details on
> what this means follow the link to the license".  I.e. the tool can't
> discern between one of the standard CC licenses or another license with
> attribution requirements that are slightly different since cc:Attribution
> could apply to both.

The tool could bake in additional knowledge, if that were pertinent.
Might not be...

> 2) Even so, when a tool encounters cc:Work properties, it can assume that
> they should be used in an attribution along CC lines. If that turns out to
> not be 100% legally correct, it is still much better than not attempting to
> do any attribution.

...right, IMO. And the bar is very low; look at attribution/notice
typical in well funded publications using publicly licensed photos.

> 3) If a tool want to provide more details, such as ensuring that the cc:Work
> properties are used correctly in the attribution, the tool must itself
> encode the requirements of a specific license URI.

Yes, ie bake in additional knowledge about specific licenses. Or
obtain more detailed descriptions of licenses elsewhere (probably
baking in where). http://clipol.org is an interesting new project in
this regard.

> 4) If a tool want to compare licenses for equality, they have to use the
> license URI.

Right, but equality can mean various things. The bug at the start of
this thread was using the wrong equality calculation to identify a
license. Might also be used to determine compatibility/allowable
licenses for remix -- in which case you need to identify individual
licenses and have more detailed descriptions than CC provides; again
clipol.org might be interesting.

Mike