On Sun, May 08, 2005 at 09:08:43AM -0700, Tim Bray wrote: > Speaking as a publisher, Robin's proposal [atom:rights not > atom:copyright] meets my needs better then what we have now.
I'm +1 on atom:rights instead of atom:copyright. atom:copyright strikes me as very limited in scope, and I agree that actually I don't care terribly much about asserting copyright ownership, but do care about asserting usage rights. For instance, in one situation I have to deal with on a semi-regular basis, it is impossible to state what the copyright ownership of some content is. (It's a complex multi-author situation with lots of implicit and historical relationships, but very few formal contracts.) However the use rights are accepted by all parties, so making statements about copyright ownership isn't worthwhile. And at the end of the day, as one of the parties with vested interest in the content, I only care about what other people are allowed to do with it. [Rights statement by URI reference] > 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. I'm -1 on getting this into Atom core. The utility of creative commons can be satisfied by using type='xhtml' and putting appropriate anchors in the text. However the Atom feed itself should, IMHO, contain a concise statement that is as complete as practical. (This doesn't mean you'll cover every possible case, but it does mean that you shouldn't rely on dereferencing a URI for important points). Saying "I'm using CC 'Attribution, No Derivatives, Non-Commercial'" and pointing to the CC URI is fine, but saying "follow this URI for rights info" and nothing else isn't. I'm concerned that making an explicit URI part of the right elements would encourage people to shift the balance the wrong way here. James -- /--------------------------------------------------------------------------\ James Aylett xapian.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] uncertaintydivision.org
