Development of Creative Commons licenses

[evan AT bad.dynu.ca (Evan Prodromou)]

On Thu, Nov 24, 2005 at 12:32:51PM -0800, Mike Linksvayer wrote:

> - There's already a well designed, amazingly flexible, decentralized
> identifier system widely deployed that CC metadata and pretty much
> everything else on the web builds upon -- URIs.  You can use a dc:source
> property to identify a source work's URI.

Some other things to note:

* The Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (on which CC Metadata is based)
  has an element "identifier" that can be used to identify works. It's
  entirely reasonable to use more than one identifier here, if you
  wish.

* You can get a so-called "Permanent URL" or "PURL" domain from
  http://purl.org/ . These can be very useful for maintaining a
  namespace of works separate from any given server.

* Common Content (http://commoncontent.org/) assigns each registered
  work a number and an URL, so you could use that URL as your
  identifier if needed.

* There are also ITU OIDs, which are pretty nice. There's an URN
  namespace for them, see here:
  
  http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3061.txt

  It might be reasonable for a works registry like Common Content to
  get an OID and then dole out OIDs to authors to use as they wish.
  
* GUIDs (AKA UUIDs) make very nice unique IDs. They can be generated
  on practically any computer, and are almost guaranteed to be unique.
  Unfortunately, they're not resolvable, like URLs are.
  
~Evan