On Mar 25, 2005, at 14:41, Henry Story wrote:
Clearly it would be very helpful if there were a machine readable way to set copyright
policy on entries. Any thoughts on that?
Legalese is complicated enough that it cannot be fully expressed in machine readable form unless the machine is AI-complete. CC has created an RDF vocabulary for describing their license elements. However, when you start describing eg. the GFDL with CC's vocabulary, you are on shaky ground, because the license details may not be exactly equivalent to the CC terms.
It seems to me that it is more straight-forward to identify a known license than to try to describe a license. Tantek Çelik has publicized and mozilla.org (among others) has adopted a 'license' rel value for HTML <link>. This approach avoids the issue of machine-readable licenses and software interpreting legalese, because a human programmer needs to supply the software with known license URIs. Obviously, this doesn't work nicely with obscure licenses but assumes that the license URIs are well-known. The solution is also less crufty than hiding RDF in discardable comments. (Hiding copyright metadata in discardable comments is a bad idea, because in some jurisdictions there may soon be legislation that makes it illegal to discard copyright metadata. The XML spec says software may discard comments.)
However, you cannot make everyone who provides useful feeds to describe their policy, so someone running a feed aggregation service still needs all lawyer who can convincingly argue against the permission culture.
-- Henri Sivonen [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
