Re: [dxwg] license and rights apply to Dataset not only Distribution

@fellahst I would never argue that associating licence information with Distribution is the only valid way of doing it, and I am aware that other initiatives and standards take a different approach. My argument is that a decision was taken in the development of DCAT and changing that decision should be based, in my view, on a conclusion that the current approach does not work in all cases. I don't know if we already have reached that conclusion.
Other than that, I think that allowing licence information in two places and then needing to specify and implement rules for entailment and overwriting makes DCAT more complex, at least for the 'simple' implementations that don't use inference engines. And added complexity leads to additional need for guidelines and risk of multiple interpretations that may hurt interoperability.
Finally, with licences there is a legal dimension to consider. If there is a rule on the technical level that licence on distribution overwrites the licence on the dataset, does that hold legally? For example, if I encounter a CC-BY dataset where the distribution that I am interested in specifies CC-BY-NC, can I argue in court that I am not in violation if I use it for commercial purposes? I've been told that in case of conflicts, one may assume the most permissive licence takes precedence. but I am not a lawyer so I don't know if this is true. In any case, we need to be careful with this.

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Received on Friday, 16 February 2018 12:42:21 UTC