[whatwg] [wf3] Idea: |copyright| and |license| attributes

[Daniel O'Connor]

Ick!

XML gave us xmlns for a reason! Failing that..

See:
http://dublincore.org/
http://creativecommons.org/
http://www.w3.org/2005/Talks/05-steven-xtech/
http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-xhtml2-20050527/mod-meta.html
http://hublog.hubmed.org/archives/001187.html
...
There's far too many more widely accepted methods of inserting
metainfomation (in the microformat / RDF + GRDDL / style) into a
(x)HTML document without the need for a "copyright" attribute.




On 9/13/05, Matthew Raymond <mattraymond at earthlink.net> wrote:
>    Had a quick thought I'd like to share with you. Often times, content
> from other sources might be inserted into a web page, or you may have
> situations where you wish people to be able to copy part of the text
> (such as a press release), but not all of it (such as the website UI and
> graphics). You may also want (or are legally required) to list the
> original holder of the copyright. There are also situations where
> managing copyright information for content is difficult without
> assistance from software.
> 
>    To resolve these problems, I suggest the creation of two new
> attributes. The first is |copyright|, which allows a copyright notice to
> be attached to an element. The copyright is inherited by all
> descendants, unless a descendant element has an assigned |copyright|
> itself, which overrides ancestor copyrights. Thus, you can theoretically
> track any part of a document back to its original copyright owner.
> 
>    The second attribute is |license|. It is inherited in the same way as
> |copyright|, and provides a name and/or URL to the license for the
> respective content. Editing software can potentially use the licensing
> information to determine if certain content can be copied into content
> under a different license. Here's an example:
> 
> | <code copyright="2005; Matthew Raymond"
> | license="GPL 2.0; http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html">
> |   // * Put non-proprietary code here...
> |   <span copyright="2004-2005; Microsoft Corporation"
> |   license="GPL Killer; http://microsoft.com/licenses/firstborn.html">
> |     // * Ultra-proprietary, patent encumbered code.
> |   </span>
> |   // * Put more non-proprietary code here...
> | </code>
> 
>    An editor supporting |copyright| and |license| could warn the author
> that the "GPL Killer" licensed content can't be used inside the "GPL
> 2.0" licensed content. Also, if the licenses are common enough, the URLs
> could simply be dropped:
> 
> | <code copyright="2005; Matthew Raymond" license="GPL 2.0">
> |   // * Put non-proprietary code here...
> |   <span copyright="2005; Microsoft Corporation" license="GPL Killer">
> |     // * Ultra-proprietary, patent encumbered code.
> |   </span>
> |   // * Put more non-proprietary code here...
> | </code>
> 
>    Well, just a thought. There may be better ways to do this already.
> Let me know what you think.
> 


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