Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

On Tuesday 07 March 2006 02:05 pm, Brian Erdelyi wrote:
> As you pointed out, I am trying to *document* or 
*describe* existing end user license agreements
>  
> Once in a system readable format (RDF/XML) there can be 
additional tools developed to notify, warn and advise users 
about the license.

Okay, I understand.
So a better question is probably "How do I extend the CC
RDF/XML format to allow automatic license terms 
determination of non-CC licenses, like EULAs, etc"

> So, it seems I should be focusing on the meta-data schema 
and a CC-like deed.

That sounds right to me.  The actual "license" is a legal
document -- and you don't need or want to write that, since
you're talking about existing ones that you want to 
classify.

> How is the CC meta-data extended to describe these 
additional characteristics of existing software?

Regrettably I haven't tried out the automatic licensing
analysis stuff -- it sounds cool, but I don't think I can 
answer the question.  But maybe we'll get an answer to 
the "better question". I'm interested too. :-)

One caveat that jumps out at me is that the CC licenses
are explicitly designed to be easy to manage in this way,
whereas the licenses you are likely to be facing are
complex and often (apparently) intentionally deceptive.

So your classification system is likely to have 
imperfections and misfits.  That will reduce its value
compared to the CC tools used with CC licenses.

I think your biggest problem is you personally deciding
which characteristics to model, more than figuring out
how to encode the model (you probably can figure out
the latter just by looking at the example data from CC).

Cheers,
Terry
 
--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com