Web Licensing Needs to Be More Granular

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Presently, all the blogs I’ve looked at (I readily concede there are blogs that I have not looked at ) which assign a license to their content do it on a page or global level.However, in a world where content reuse is the norm, any given web page or web site is likely a mash-up of content, or using content with multiple authors, carrying varied licenses. As such the published license is actually inaccurate.

For example,

Previously I pointed out the excellently attributed blog by Miss 604. In it she reuses the following image:

Rebecca, publishes her blog under the Creative Commons 2.5 license. However, the image she reused is published under the Creative Commons 2.0 license. To regular Joes and Janes this really is not a big deal, we can read the attribution for the image. Then we can go check out the actual source and then find the associated license for that content. That’s what ethical people reading her blog would do if they wanted to reuse the image by Squeaky Marmot

But, licensing metadata on a website should be more than human readable. We want the license to be machine readable. This way we (by that I mean the global “we”) can develop systems that search for, discover, and reuse content with the appropriate licenses. If we do not wrap each object, with an appropriate license not only is publishing a work potential misleading, it makes systems designed for content reuse very difficult to develop.

That’s why the proposed microformat drafted by Play The Web dot org is contained by a set of classes. What defines those and what they are called is still to be determined. This way Rebecca can clearly re-publish the image under Creative Commons 2.0, while keeping her original content under 2.5.

Seamus and Rob will be at Yahoo! Hackday this weekend to talk about this idea and how a simple systems could be developed to support the format and how it could integrate into a number of publishing and authoring tools.

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