discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

[Mike Linksvayer <ml AT creativecommons.org>]

As noted on our weblog yesterday 
<http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/3968> warranties, currently 
mandatory, will be disclaimed in a new version of the CC licenses. 
We'll have a protocol for adding warranties if desired.

Here's the beginning of a stab at the metadata side of such a protocol:

The new versions open up the possibility of offering arbitrary 
warranties, written by CC or not.  If the warranty is just a URI in the 
metadata, it could refer a form document hosted by CC all the way to a 
work/licensor-specific bonded attestation(?) hosted by some rights 
clearing company.

I think we can do this simply by adding a "warranty" element, used as 
"license" is currently.

<Work rdf:about="http://example.com/pictures";>
  <license rdf:resource="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/"; />
  <warranty rdf:resource="http://rightsrus.com/cleared?id=dcfdb6d518"; />
</Work>

This doesn't explicitly tie the warranty to the license (in metadata) or 
to the entity offering the license, but we don't make explicit who is 
offering a license either (if a cc:Agent is present it might be safe to 
assume that it is making the offer, but the relationship isn't explicit 
in the RDF).  Which is to argue that this simple warranty expression is ok.

In order to complete this protocol should we define a base set of 
properties a Warranty might have (as we have done (necessarily) with 
License characteristics)?  I don't have any thoughts on what those 
properties might be, would welcome suggestions.  I don't think we need 
to thoroughly define a Warranty vocabulary in order to move forward.

So what I am minimally proposing [optional]

cc:warranty
    A copyright warranty for the resource[, a structured cc:Warranty.

cc:Warranty
    A warranty is described by the features it offers.

    cc:offers RightsCleared

    ???]


Critisize please. (I just gave you a really easy one.)

--
  Mike Linksvayer
  http://creativecommons.org/learn/aboutus/people#21