item-license

item-license is one of several licensing brainstorm proposals, per the microformats process towards developing a licensing microformat for authors to indicate licenses to portions of pages or external resources like images.

Editors

Tantek Çelik (http://tantek.com/)

Mike Linksvayer (Creative Commons)

summary

This proposal (re-)uses the containing/root class "item" (see also hReview, hListing, hProduct) to indicate the scope of the thing that is being licensed, rel="item-license" to indicate the specific license(s), "item-url" to license one or external resources like images, and "attribution" to indicate attribution information.

content portion licensing

Here is an example of a chunk of hypertext content that is being licensed:

<div class="item">
  <p>... blog post or article text content ...</p>
  <p>This is licensed under a
  <a rel="item-license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/">
   Creative Commons attribution non-commercial 3.0 license</a>.
  </p>
</div>

with dual licensing:

<div class="item">
  <p>... blog post or article text content ...</p>
  <p>This is licensed under a
  <a rel="item-license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/">
   Creative Commons attribution non-commercial 3.0 license</a>
  and a
  <a rel="item-license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/">
   Creative Commons attribution no-derivative works 3.0 license</a>.
  </p>
</div>

In this case, the publisher is stating that either you may re-use and edit etc. the content for non-commercial purposes, or you re-use for commercial purposes but may not make derivative works.

external resource licensing

To specify a license on an external resource like a photograph, we can use a new class name "item-url" to identify the external resource as being the actual item:

<div class="item">
  This 
  <a class="item-url" href="photo.jpg">photograph</a>
  is licensed under a
  <a rel="item-license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/">
   Creative Commons attribution non-commercial 3.0 license
  </a>.
</div>

format

root class name

The root class name for item-license is item.

A simple item can be indicated as follows:

<span class="item">
...
</span>

As with other microformats, the particular element (span, div, etc.) doesn't matter for item-license.

properties

The following properties can be specified as class names unless otherwise indicated. All properties are optional and may occur more than once.

• item-license - a rel-value used on a hyperlink to a license for the item. multiple instances indicate independent licensing options.
• item-url - an external representation of the item that is licensed, such as an image, video, audio, binary download, etc.
• attribution - an author/creator (which SHOULD be represented with an hCard, possibly with a URL to the person/organization) to be attributed for the item. if "attribution" is specified directly on a hyperlink, the hyperlink represents a link to a page with the item and copyright information for the item.

property details

item-license details

• Authors SHOULD provide at least one "item-license".
• If there is no item-license link in the item, then the item is not explicitly licensed.

item-url details

• Authors SHOULD provide at least one "item-url" when an external resource is being licensed.
• If more than one "item-url" is provided, they must be considered copies/mirrors/versions (perhaps different resolutions or formats) of the same item, and all have the same license(s) and attribution terms (if any) applied to them.

Possible additions to item-url to handle local items in other parts of the page:

• At most one "item-url" may reference a local fragment id (e.g. <a href="#real-item" class="item-url">), and if there is such an "item-url" then it indicates that the entirety of the item is represented by the microformat at that fragment id. This would permit licensing information on one part of a page to refer to an item (such as a blog post) on another part of a page. Anecdotally, I remember seeing blogs where the licensing of the blog posts is in the footer, separate from the chunk of content that contains the blog posts themselves. In most cases rel-license may be sufficient here - that is, applying to the whole page, but that doesn't cover the "attribution" use case, nor the possible (but needs examples) use case of where the posts are licensed, but not other content on the page.
  • real world examples needed to help guide this.
• Allow "item-url" to reference *multiple* items that the license applies to, e.g. all the blog posts on a page, but not the page itself. A space separated set of fragment id references could work for representing this, e.g. (e.g. <a href="#real-item-1 #real-item-2 #real-item-n" class="item-url">), but would likely not work well in the interactivity of that hyperlink.
  • real world examples needed to help guide this
• Alternatively, some other mechanism for a license description (rel-item-license + attribution) to reference one or more items elsewhere on the page.
  • Though it probably makes more sense to simply use the include-pattern in those items elsewhere on the page to all include a common "item-license" at the footer of a page. The only case this wouldn't work for is if the item-license was an ancestor of all the items, which the include-pattern would disallow including.

attribution details

• If "attribution" is directly specified on a hyperlink (<a href>), the "href" indicates the suggested link to the original item that is being licensed and contains copyright information for the item being licensed.
• if it is on an hCard, the "fn" of the hCard indicates the name of an author/creator of the work, and the "url" indicates the URL that is suggested for linking to their name (prefer the first "url" with "uid" if any, otherwise the first "url" if the hCard has more than one).
• if "attribution" is on an element that is neither a hyperlink nor an hCard, then the element indicates the name of an author/creator of the work

more examples

The following examples illustrate how the properties interact, and multiple uses of properties.

multiple resolutions licensing

multiple item-url properties:

e.g. a link to the photo and embedding a thumbnail or small version of the photo:

<div class="item">
  This 
  <a class="item-url" href="photo.jpg">photograph:
   <img class="item-url" href="smallphoto.jpg" alt="small version of a photograph" />
  </a>
  is licensed under a
  <a rel="item-license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/">
   Creative Commons attribution non-commercial 3.0 license
  </a>.
</div>

attribution example to an author

<div class="item">
  This 
  <a class="item-url" href="photo.jpg">photograph</a>
  is licensed under a
  <a rel="item-license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/">
   Creative Commons attribution non-commercial 3.0 license
  </a>.
  Please attribute the photo to <span class="attribution">Mary Smith</span>
</div>

with an hCard for the author:

<div class="item">
  This 
  <a class="item-url" href="photo.jpg">photograph</a>
  is licensed under a
  <a rel="item-license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/">
   Creative Commons attribution non-commercial 3.0 license
  </a>.
  Please attribute the photo to 
  <span class="attribution vcard">
    <span class="fn">Mary Smith</span>
  </span>
</div>

with a hyperlinked hCard for the author:

<div class="item">
  This 
  <a class="item-url" href="photo.jpg">photograph</a>
  is licensed under a
  <a rel="item-license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/">
   Creative Commons attribution non-commercial 3.0 license
  </a>.
  Please attribute the photo to 
  <span class="attribution vcard">
    <a class=" fn url" href="http://mary.example.com/">Mary Smith</a>
  </span>
</div>

attribution example to original and author

multiple attribution properties:

<div class="item">
  This 
  <a class="item-url" href="photo.jpg">photograph</a>
  is licensed under a
  <a rel="item-license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/">
   Creative Commons attribution non-commercial 3.0 license
  </a>.
  Please attribute the photo to 
  <span class="attribution vcard">
    <a class=" fn url" href="http://mary.example.com/">Mary Smith</a>
  </span>
  and link to 
  <a class="attribution" href="http://mary.example.com/photo123/">the original photo page</a>.
</div>

references

normative references

• hCard

background

item-license was extracted and expanded from the item as container proposal in licensing-brainstorming.

see also

• licensing
• licensing-examples
• licensing-formats
• licensing-brainstorming

to do

EDITORS NOTES:

• post photo (and embed/link here) of whiteboard brainstorm 2010-055 at Creative Commons offices with Tantek Çelik and Mike Linksvayer and details
• write up an XMDP for item-license
• have hNews reference this page
• write-up item-license examples similar to microdata works vocabulary samples/examples (also microdata works vocab to RDF example.)
• document how to convert item-license to RDF, similar to converting HTML5+microdata to RDF (see also WHATWG microdata to RDF.
  • specifically how to convert item-license to ccREL namespace (see also related: old ccREL submission to W3C).
• consider any interactions between "item, item-url, attribution" and citation, and document how to use together of possible future interoperability
• consider any interactions between "item-url" and Citability

feedback

Please feel free to provide feedback (questions, issues etc.) about item-license here. If this section gets too big we can move it to item-license-feedback. Thanks! -Tantek

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