Re: atom license extension (Re: [cc-tab] *important* heads up)

[John Panzer]

Bob Wyman wrote: ... The most interesting cases will be those licenses that attempt to assert limitations to rights which would normally be considered to be granted to consumers of feeds. Such rights would include things like "Fair Use" and "implied licenses." It is *vitally* important to our community that we ensure that such restrictive licenses are not encouraged or facilitated by this rfc. This is a critical point.  Without this, implementors cannot safely ignore licenses they don't understand (falling back to things like "fair use" if they can't find any licenses that grant additional copying rights).  This means that implementors would likely have to drop feeds containing new licenses on the floor, meaning that new license schemes would never be deployed. ... Thus, it would seem that the only effective use of the license link is to grant rights not to restrict them. Yes.  Given the current murky and complicated legal situation with implied licenses, fair use, etc., granting explicit and well defined rights is a huge win for everyone. The second sentence in 1.1 is: Nor can a license associated with a feed or entry restrict or forbid access to, redistribution, aggregation, caching and display of those items by third party intermediaries such as search engines and so-called "online aggregators". This second part of 1.1 is stating support for the theory that the act of publishing data in the Atom format creates an "implied license" for the limited purpose of syndication and lists a number of processes which are considered to be part of the syndication process. Hopefully, my discussion of the first sentence explains what this is all about. My only suggestion for this sentence is that it might be less strongly worded. Given that the law in this area is not settled, it might make sense not to say "Nor can a license... restrict..." Rather, it might be more accurate to say something like: "It is believed that a license ... cannot restrict...." How about (IANAL of course): "Nor can a license.... restrict or remove any implied copy or usage rights which would otherwise exist in the absence of the license." The intent being that adding a license, or a new type of license, is always safe:  If what you're doing with content is allowable, if the feed provider adds a license, it is still allowable.  -John Panzer