Network Working Group J. Snell
Internet-Draft August 22, 2005
Expires: February 23, 2006
Feed License Link Relation
draft-snell-atompub-feed-license-02.txt
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Copyright Notice
Copyright (C) The Internet Society (2005).
Abstract
This memo presents a mechanism that allows feed publishers to
associate copyright licenses with feeds and entries.
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Table of Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
2. Notational Conventions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
3. The 'license' link relation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
4. Security Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
5. IANA Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
6. References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Author's Address . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
A. Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Intellectual Property and Copyright Statements . . . . . . . . 6
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1. Introduction
This document specifies a mechanism that allows feed publishers the
ability to associate copyright licenses with the informational
content of an entry. Licenses associated using these mechanisms MAY
or MAY not be machine readable and are intended to communicate the
various rights and obligations others may have with regards to given
resource.
2. Notational Conventions
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "REQUIRED", "SHALL", "SHALL NOT",
"SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED", "MAY", and "OPTIONAL" in this
document are to be interpreted as described in BCP 14, [RFC2119], as
scoped to those conformance targets.
In this specification, "entry" refers to an atom:entry element.
In this specification, "feed" refers to an Atom Feed Document.
In this specification, "head section" refers to the children of a
feed's document-wide metadata container; e.g., the child elements of
the atom:feed element in an Atom Feed Document.
In this specification, "link" refers to the atom:link element.
In this specification, "link relation" refers to the value of the
atom:link element's rel attribute.
3. The 'license' link relation
The 'license' link relation is used to associate a copyright license
with Atom Feed and Entry Documents.
o atom:entry elements MAY contain any number of 'license' link
relations.
o atom:feed elements MAY contain any number of 'license' link
relations.
o atom:source elements MAY contain any number of 'license' link
relations.
License link relations appearing as children of the atom:feed or
atom:source elements apply only to the informational content of the
containing element, and not to the informational content of any
associated atom:entry elements.
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For example
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
<id>http://www.example.com/myfeed</id>
<title>My Example Feed</title>
<updated>2005-07-28T12:00:00Z</updated>
<link href="http://www.example.com/myfeed" />
<link rel="license"
type="text/html"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/" />
<author><name>James</name></author>
<entry>
<id>tag:entries.com,2005:1</td>
<title>My original entry</title>
<link href="http://www.example.com/entries/1" />
<summary>This is my original entry</summary>
<link rel="license"
type="text/html"
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/" />
</entry>
</feed>
Multiple license link relations MAY be used to indicate that the
informational content has been published under multiple copright
licenses. In such instances, each of the linked licenses is
considered to be mutually exclusive of the others. That is to say,
for example, if an entry contains license links to both a Creative
Commons License and the General Public License (GPL), the
informational content is considered to be licensed either as
"Creative Commons or GPL" as opposed to "Creative Commons and GPL".
4. Security Considerations
Feeds using the mechanisms described here could be crafted in such a
way as to cause a consumer to initiate excessive (or even an unending
sequence of) network requests, causing denial of service (either to
the consumer, the target server, and/or intervening networks). This
risk can be mitigated by requiring user intervention after a certain
number of requests, or by limiting requests either according to a
hard limit, or with heuristics.
5. IANA Considerations
This specification defines one new Atom link relation type to be
registered in the IANA Registry of Link Relations as defined by
[I-D.ietf-atompub-format].
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Attribute Value: license
Description: (see section 3)
Expected display characteristics: (see section 3)
Security considerations: (see section 4)
6. References
[I-D.ietf-atompub-format]
Sayre, R. and M. Nottingham, "The Atom Syndication
Format", draft-ietf-atompub-format-11 (work in progress),
August 2005.
[RFC2119] Bradner, S., "Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate
Requirement Levels", BCP 14, RFC 2119, March 1997.
[W3C.REC-xml-infoset-20040204]
Tobin, R. and J. Cowan, "XML Information Set (Second
Edition)", W3C REC REC-xml-infoset-20040204,
February 2004.
Author's Address
James M Snell
Phone:
Email: jasnell@gmail.com
URI: http://snellspace.com
Appendix A. Acknowledgements
The author gratefully acknowledges the feedback from Mike Linksvayer,
Robin Cover, and the members of Atom Publishing Format and Protocol
working group during the development of this specification.
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