RE: data.gov.* memo

Hi Peter,

I agree with you, for XHTML and HTML-based data, something like the
following (recommended by Creative Commons) could be very useful.

	<a rel="license" href="
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/ ">
	Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States
License</a>.

But my hunch is governments won't want to point to a resource outside their
control.  

What if the CIO_Council/White House/GPO/LOC/FirstGov/ established copyright
URIs like http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/us/ and asked the
Federal government (or even just their agency) to point to those pages as
needed?  OTOH, if something like this already exists within the government,
I think its use should be promoted.  

Many Federal websites (if not all) have Privacy Policies and many of them
are using P3P to accomplish this requirement
(http://www.usa.gov/webcontent/reqs_bestpractices/laws_regs/privacy_p3p.shtm
l) so adding copyright policy pages might not be a huge leap.

At http://www.opsi.gov.uk/about/copyright-notice.htm "The permission to
reproduce Crown protected material does not extend to any material on this
site which is identified as being the copyright of a third party."   John:
How are those copyrighted materials identified?

Thanks,
Joe




-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Krantz [mailto:peter.krantz@gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 1:11 PM
To: Joe Carmel
Cc: Novak, Kevin; Acar, Suzanne; daniel@citizencontact.com;
jonathan.gray@okfn.org; josema@w3.org; public-egov-ig@w3.org;
John.Sheridan@nationalarchives.gov.uk; site-policy@w3.org
Subject: Re: data.gov.* memo

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 18:34, Joe Carmel<joe.carmel@comcast.net> wrote:
> Given our focus on an electronic government, I think
> we need to consider recommending that in order to avoid copyright
> infringement by machines, governments should consider providing copyright
> information in a machine-readable standards-based format (which I don't
> believe exists?) especially for the files on their sites that are
protected
> by copyright.
>

This could maybe be a use case for semantic web technologies. In fact,
Creative commons have established URI:s for the various licenses which
allows them to use them in a machine readable way. An example is to
embed CC license info in a XHTML page with RDFa (see
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/RDFa). The same method can of course
be used in all data served as RDF.

Regards,

Peter Krantz

Received on Tuesday, 16 June 2009 19:05:25 UTC