There is, I think a bit of tortured text in James Snell's otherwise useful License ID[1].
1.3. Terminology ... The term "license" refers to a potentially machine-readable description of explicit rights, and associated obligations, that have been granted to consumers of an Atom feed or entry. The problem is the underlined clause... One can't "grant" an obligation. (When you have a conjunction, you should be able to scan the sentence with only one element of the conjunction without losing meaning...) As written, the sentence can be read by nitpicking lawyers as: "The term 'license' refers to obligations that have been granted..." Clearly, this isn't the intent. Thus, I propose the following rewording: The term "license" refers to a potentially machine-readable description of explicit rights that have been granted to consumers of an Atom feed or entry. Rights granted by a license may be associated with obligations which must be assumed by those exercising those rights. I realize that this is a bit more wordy than the existing text, however, I think it better perserves the author's intent. Also, it has the nice attribute of limiting the discussion of "obligations" to the scope of rights granted by the licenses -- not rights that might exist in the absence of the license. Nothing we do should encourage people to use in-feed or in-entry data to restrict rights which exist independent of an explicit license grant. Such rights may include fair-use rights, the right to create backups, the implied right to syndicate, etc. As with Creative Commons licenses, I believe our goal here should be to provide mechanisms to expand the rights granted -- not to restrict them. bob wyman [1] http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-snell-atompub-feed-license-10.txt
