Re: Comment on XHTML2 WD: adding a "license" REL

Dan Brickley wrote:
> However I wonder whether the dc:rights relationship would be adequate here.

In the context of RDF CC decided to define cc:license as a subproperty 
of dc:rights, I believe because the typical use of dc:rights is to 
provide a very general rights statement, e.g., "(c) 1999 John Smith".  A 
license relationship doesn't attempt to denote the rights holder or 
other rights details.

Subsequently DC introduced dcterms:license, which cc:license is now a 
subproperty of.  Had dcterms:license existed when CC launched CC almost 
certainly would've used it directly.

> A natural question here then, is whether the proposed
> xhtml2:license relationship has dc:rights as a super-property. Do you 
> expect the dc:rights relationship to be true of any pair of documents R 
> and L that stand in an xhtml2:license relationship?

FWIW dcterms:license is a subproperty of dc:rights.

> Could you say a little more about why DC doesn't work for CC use cases?
> (In [1] I see a CC-based attempt to have the dc:rights property relate a 
> document to an Agent that is a rights-holder. I remember seeing this a 
> couple of years ago (DC 2003 meeting?) and thinking it over-stretched 
> the meaning of dc:rights.

The more typical complaint about CC's use of dc:rights to describe a 
rights holding agent is that a description of the rights holding agent 
isn't a description of the subject's copyright.

DC introduced dcterms:rightsHolder at the same time it introduced 
dcterms:license.  It's been on my todo list for a long time to deprecate 
  our silly dc:rights/cc:Agent use and replace with dctertms:rightsHolder.

dcterms:rightsHolder is also a subproperty of dc:rights.


FWIW one nice probably unintended feature of adopting rel="license" is 
that the "semantic XHTML" crowd has already adopted just that syntax 
http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/RelLicense without suspecting they 
were on the RDF bandwagon. :)

-- 
  Mike Linksvayer
  http://creativecommons.org/about/people#21

Received on Wednesday, 22 June 2005 20:48:41 UTC