On May 7, 2005, at 3:29 PM, Robin Cover wrote:
The publication of a new Implementation Guideline by the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) compels me to suggest once again [1], as Norm Walsh [2], Bob Wyman [3], and others have done before, that the name 'atom:rights' would be better than the (current) element name 'atom:copyright'.
+1
Speaking as a publisher, Robin's proposal meets my needs better then what we have now. The legal advice I've received is that in many cases it's not necessary to assert copyright, unless it's being claimed by a party other than the other. On the other hand, I think many online publishers will want to specify various kinds of licensing and rights statements. Right now, 4.2.4 of format-08 says "The "atom:copyright" element is a Text construct that conveys a human-readable copyright statement for an entry or feed." Well, this fails to meet the needs in the very common case where you don't want to talk about copyright but you do want to talk about re-use limitations and so on. On the other hand, if you want to specify some details about the actual copyright, <atom:rights> is an OK place to do so.
I believe the Atom spec can do this similarly (and minimally) with an 'atom:rights' element in place of 'atom:copyright'. It can do so optimally by allowing one (optional) generic URI reference to a resource that documents the "rights" statement(s) from the creator of an Atom feed/entry. Something non-legal, like 'rightsDescription="URI"'.
Once again, speaking as a publisher who's not a lawyer, I find it very helpful to use widely-shared rights statements by reference - in my case, Creative Commons. So having a standardized URI to point to whatever I'm using would be a value-add for me.
Once again, I'm not speaking for implementors, but for authors and publishers. Robin's suggestions would be of benefit to that community. -Tim
