discussion of the Creative Commons Metadata work

[Nathan Yergler <nathan AT creativecommons.org>]

On Thu, Nov 26, 2009 at 7:32 AM, Christoph LANGE
<ch.lange AT jacobs-university.de> wrote:
> Hi Nathan, hi all,
>
> 2009-08-20 19:55 Nathan Yergler <nathan AT creativecommons.org>:
>> Sorry for such a delayed reply here.  I'm working on cleaning out my
>> reply queue and obviously this got stuck :).
>
> even more delay here, sorry once more.
>
>> As we've discussed off list, part of the answer here is better
>> communication of how ccREL models a copyright license.  ccREL assumes
>> a baseline of copyright and then offers additional permissions beyond
>> what's allowed under copyright.  Those permissions may be further
>> refined with prohibitions or requirements (ie, Commercial Use or
>> Attribution).  With this sort of model negating those individual terms
>> doesn't make a lot of sense.
>
> OK, thanks for that explanation; we should consider it in our spec.
>
>> With respect to OWL, a volunteer began the process of "porting" the
>> schema to OWL and at some point the process stalled.  As far as I know
>> there wasn't a technical issue, rather I think their need went away
>> (or changed).  If an OWL representation would be useful we'd
>> definitely provide review and hosting for it (as a peer with the RDF
>> Schema).
>
> Maybe OWL is not even needed.  My initial concern could be resolved if the
> ranges of cc:permits and cc:prohibits were merged.  IMHO it is due to the
> history of the development of the CC licenses that e.g. you can only say 
> that
> reproduction is permitted, as prohibiting reproduction had probably never 
> been
> an issue for CC licenses.
>
> But now consider that ccREL is possibly the only widely used license
> vocabulary ever, and that people might want to reuse it for modeling 
> licenses
> that are somewhat different from those the original CC ones.  So what if I
> wanted to say that in _my_ illiberal license reproduction is prohibited?  
> Then
> it would be helpful to allow <:license cc:prohibits cc:Reproduction>.  (Not
> sure, though, if CC is willing to allow people to express such evil 
> statements
> ;-)

Well we certainly can't *stop* people from making such an assertion,
but if you're trying to be very restrictive it's may not be a license
at that point, but rather a EULA or something similar (IANAL, TINLA,
etc).  If it's just a license, saying cc:prohibits cc:Reproduction
doesn't make much sense.  Some reproduction is almost always allowed,
and since we're starting from the basis of copyright, the statement is
redundant for many if not most cases.  So you could imagine using some
of the CC terms and schema for your EULA modeling, but maybe you have
a different class for it (UserAgreement instead of cc:License, for
example).

Just $0.02 off the top of my head.

NRY


>
> Cheers,
>
> Christoph
>
> --
> Christoph Lange, Jacobs Univ. Bremen, http://kwarc.info/clange, Skype 
> duke4701
>