[whatwg] HTML 5: Wording of "license" link type is too narrow
Arne Johannessen
arne at thaw.de
Wed May 28 01:24:06 PDT 2008
Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Sat, 2 Feb 2008, Dave Hodder wrote:
>>
>> The scope of the "license" link type in section 4.12.3 seems too
>> narrow
>> to me. It's presently described like this:
>>
>> Indicates that the current document is covered by the copyright
>> license described by the referenced document.
>>
>> I think the word "copyright" should be removed, allowing other
>> types of
>> intellectual property licence to be specified as well. As a use
>> case,
>> take for example a piece of documentation that is Apache-licensed:
>>
>> <p>This piece of useful documentation may be used under the
>> terms of the <a rel="license"
>> ref="http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0">Apache License,
>> Version 2.0</a>. Please note that Example™ is a trademark
>> of Example.com Enterprises.</p>
>>
>> The license link not only refers to copyright law, but also trademark
>> law and patent law.
>
> Sure, the license can cover things other than copyright. But it is
> primarily a copyright license, and that is the part that the
> rel="license"
> keyword is referring to. The copyright license being part and parcel
> of a
> bigger license isn't a problem, IMHO.
Agreed.
> In particular, we don't want people to use rel=license to point to
> trademark licenses or patent licenses that _aren't_ copyright
> licenses.
Why not, what's the downside?
What is the correct way to mark up links to, say, a trademark license
_not_ covering copyright, given the current draft of the spec?
--
Arne Johannessen
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