Consider this description of an attribution license:

The licensor permits others to copy, distribute, display, and perform  
the work. In return, licensees must give the original author credit.

If you restrict descriptions to permissions, requirements and  
prohibitions, I think you never get that description.

The js widget (version 0.95) never describes attribution only, I  
think. It assumes the user knows the basic license and gets the basic  
gist of the license conditions by adding or removing other elements.   
But it doesn't have a simple description of what you get if you select  
a CC license and remove all the optional properties.

Jim



On Feb 25, 2009, at 5:19 PM, Nathan Yergler wrote:

> Great; I think we need to do some thinking here about what we have
> accurate translation strings for; it may be that we should be
> publishing descriptions for the license properties, not the licenses
> themselves.  I've opened a ticket to track this
> (http://code.creativecommons.org/issues/issue163).
>
> Nathan
>
> On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 7:36 PM, Jim Eng <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Hi Nathan,
>>
>> Thanks for your replies.  The sum of the parts is fine.  It doesn't  
>> have to
>> be a single sentence.  But we're looking for a short paragraph that
>> describes the license.  If we get that by concatenating  
>> descriptions of the
>> various parts, so be it.
>>
>> Jim
>>
>>
>>
>> On Feb 24, 2009, at 4:55 PM, Nathan Yergler wrote:
>>
>>> Hi Jim --
>>>
>>> So the problem here is that the RDF you're looking at was generated
>>> programmatically from existing systems.  One of our ongoing
>>> goals/challenges is to make reality match what we claim; that is,  
>>> that
>>> the RDF is the canonical representation of the license.  I'm happy  
>>> to
>>> report that we're going to be putting some directed effort into this
>>> in the next month or so, but I expect there will be some rough  
>>> spots.
>>> Like this one.  The reason there's no description for the "compound"
>>> licenses is that the descriptions you're seeing are actually for the
>>> particular license elements (ie, "BY" or "NC"), not the entire
>>> license.  I suppose to make the RDF match reality we should purge  
>>> all
>>> of those dc:description elements, since calling them the description
>>> of the license is potentially inaccurate.
>>>
>>> It might be useful to find out what you expect a reasonable value of
>>> dc:description for a License would be.  If it's a one sentence  
>>> summary
>>> of the license, I'm not sure we have an analogous "feature" right  
>>> now
>>> on the site.
>>>
>>> Nathan
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 6:36 AM, Jim Eng <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I am looking at the license metadata from the licenses directory of
>>>> the liblicense-0.8.1 zip file.  I'm wondering about the logic for
>>>> finding a license description.  The metadata defines 376  
>>>> licenses, and
>>>> only a few of them have "dc:description" elements.  Those with
>>>> descriptions are the simple licenses ("by", "nc", "nd", "sa").  The
>>>> composite licenses (e.g. "by-nc-nd", "by-nc-sa", "by-nc", "by-nd- 
>>>> nc",
>>>> "by-nd", "by-sa", "nc-sa") do not contain definition elements.
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Suppose I want to display an plain-English (or plain-French or  
>>>> plain-
>>>> Chinese or whatever locale my user requires) description of a "by- 
>>>> nc-
>>>> nd" license for a particular jurisdiction.  I would start with the
>>>> most recent version of that license for the jurisdiction (2.5 in  
>>>> most
>>>> cases or 3.0 if the jurisdiction is the USA) and find that it  
>>>> does not
>>>> have a description.  So do I then look for the three licenses  
>>>> ("by",
>>>> "nc" and "nd") and combine their descriptions to get the  
>>>> description
>>>> of "by-nc-nd"?
>>>>
>>>> If the answer to the last question is "yes", here's a follow-up
>>>> question: It looks like the most recent general description of  
>>>> "by" is
>>>> 3.0, but most (or all?) of the licenses for separate jurisdictions
>>>> have descriptions in version 2.5. Which should we use -- the
>>>> description for the preferred locale for the general 3.0 "by"  
>>>> license
>>>> or the description for the preferred locale for the specific
>>>> jurisdiction's 2.5 "by" license?  For "nc" and "nd", do I use the  
>>>> 1.0
>>>> version unless the jurisdiction is "jp", in which case, do I use  
>>>> the
>>>> 2.0 description?
>>>>
>>>> The metadata in the license files seems to be silent on the  
>>>> question
>>>> of how to find an appropriate description unless it's included in  
>>>> the
>>>> license itself (or in a license referenced in an "isReplacedBy"  
>>>> tag or
>>>> a "source" tag). By that I mean that the metadata for version 3.0  
>>>> of
>>>> the "by-nc-nd" license makes no reference to any prior versions  
>>>> or to
>>>> the "by", "nc" or "nd" licenses.  That makes me wonder if the  
>>>> plain-
>>>> language description for a particular locale and jurisdition is
>>>> defined somewhere else?
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for any suggestions.
>>>>
>>>> Jim
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> cc-devel mailing list
>>>> [email protected]
>>>> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-devel
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>
>

_______________________________________________
cc-devel mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-devel

Reply via email to