At 13:46 04/11/12, Tim Bray wrote: > >On Nov 11, 2004, at 8:35 PM, Robert Sayre wrote:
>> Put another way, if you have a a feed of ten entries, with one entry attributed to someone else, your feed-level authorship still applies to all ten entries.
>>
>Once again, why? It's so easy to explain and understand: if there's an <author> in the <head>, then that applies to all the <entry>s which don't have their own <author>. Simple, logical, uncomplicated, efficient. Either you're straining at a gnat or I'm failing to see the elephant in the room -Tim
Another try in the hope to make it even clearer for Robert:
Inheritance still works. What is special for <author> and <copyright> in <feed> is that in addition to being inherited like everything else, they also apply (or Robert things they do or should apply; I haven't read the spec) to the feed as such.
The feed-level authorship or copyright doesn't apply to 'all ten entries' in the sense of 'each and every single entry', but only in the sense of 'the specific collection of these ten entries together in this combination and composition'.
[There is also the issue that authorship and copyright may apply more or less to such collections; as an example, a third party providing a feed with "the last ten entries from Tim Bray's blog" cannot claim much of a copyright because what they do is really trivial; on the other hand, a careful collection/arrangement of ten entries from different authors on related topics in a new and artistic way, together leading to new insights or a big laugh for the reader can very well claim authorship and copyright.]
If we take the above interpretation, then the case where it may be easiest to see the difference is the following: A feed with entries all by one author, but in an original composition by a second author. (An obvious example might be a feed put together by the second author to try to show that the first author doesn't know what he's saying and is constantly contradicting himself.)
In Robert's interpretation, the feed would have the second author, all the entries would have the first author. In another, purely and only inheriting, interpretation, which does not attribute any importance to the feed or sees such attribution as a completely separate problem, it would be enough to put the first author in the feed.
So again: The question is not whether things inherit or not, but whether other than just inheriting, they have their own function on the feed level. My personal opinion: the later would be fine with me.
Regards, Martin.
