RE: Schema usage and licensing

At OCLC, we've explicitly considered appropriate attribution of our content to consist of using our URLs.  If the user is using oclc.org (or viaf.org) URLs, that's good enough.  I've always assumed the same for schema.org.

Ralph

-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Brickley [mailto:danbri@google.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, February 10, 2016 10:00 AM
To: Tati Chevron <tati@gotati.com>
Cc: schema.org Mailing List <public-schemaorg@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Schema usage and licensing

On 8 February 2016 at 10:31, Tati Chevron <tati@gotati.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Could somebody clarify exactly how the licensing agreement described 
> at schema.org is supposed to apply to websites making use of this standard?
>
> The schema.org terms of service note that, [the rights are], 
> "...licensed to third parties under the Creative Commons 
> Attribution-ShareAlike License (version 3.0)".
>
> I assume that the intent is to allow unrestricted usage of valid 
> schema markup, but protect the published standard.
>
> However, my understanding is that a strict interpretation of this 
> licensing requirement would:
>
> 1. Require any website making use of the schema vocabulary to include 
> an attribution to schema.org.

To the best of my knowledge no party involved in the project has ever taken such a strict interpretation. However it is in the nature of schema.org markup that uses of it naturally include URLs such as http://schema.org/ which would already address such a requirement.


> 2. Cause the content of any website making use of the published schema 
> vocabulary to fall under the same license.

Similarly, I don't believe anyone reads things that way.

Dan

> So far, despite much interest in including such semantic markup in all 
> of my projects, I've completely avoided the standard described at 
> schema.org for these reasons.
>
> Is this an open, un-encumbered standard or should I develop my own?
>
> Thanks.
>
> --
> Tati Chevron.
> http://www.gotati.com/

>
>

Received on Wednesday, 10 February 2016 15:07:08 UTC