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The Digital Public Domain

 | 
Melanie Dulong de Rosnay
, 
Juan Carlos De Martin

III. Developments and Case Studies

10. CC REL: The Creative Commons Rights Expression Language

Hal Abelson, Ben Adida, Mike Linksvayer and Nathan Yergler

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  • 1 This chapter contains stylistic, formatting, and minor updates of ”ccREL: The Creative Commons Rig (...)
  • 2 RDF is a language for representing information about resources in the World Wide Web. We provide a (...)
  • 3 By ”publisher” we mean anyone who places CC-licensed material on the Internet. By ”tool builders” (...)

1This chapter introduces the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (CC REL), the standard recommended by Creative Commons (CC) for machine-readable expression of copyright licensing terms and related information.1 CC REL and its description in this contribution supersede all previous CC recommendations for expressing licensing metadata. Like CC’s previous recommendation, CC REL is based on the World Wide Web Consortium’s Resource Description Framework (RDF).2 Compared to the previous recommendation, CC REL is intended to be both easier for content creators and publishers to provide, and more convenient for user communities and tool builders to consume, extend and redistribute.3

  • 4 RDFa is an emerging collection of attributes and processing rules for extending XHTML to support R (...)

2Formally, CC REL is specified in an abstract syntax-free way, as an extensible set of properties to be associated with a licensed document. Publishers have wide discretion in their choice of syntax, so long as the process for extracting the properties is discoverable and tool builders can retrieve the properties of CC REL-compliant webpages or embedded documents. We also recommend specific concrete ”default” syntaxes and embedding schemes for content creators and publishers who want to use CC licenses without needing to be concerned about extraction mechanisms. The default schemes are RDFa for HTML webpages and resources referenced therein, and XMP for stand-alone media.4

3For example, using this new recommendation, an author can express CC-structured data in an HTML page using the following simple markup:

4From this markup, tools can easily and reliably determine that http://lessig. org/blog is licensed under a CC Attribution License, v3.0, where attribution should be given to ”Lawrence Lessig” at the URL http://lessig.org.

5This chapter explains the design rationale for these recommendations and illustrates some specific applications we expect CC REL to support. We begin with a review of the original 2002 recommendation for CC metadata and we explain why, as CC has grown, we have come to regard this as inadequate. We then introduce CC REL in the syntax-free model: as a vocabulary of properties. Next, we describe the recommended concrete syntaxes. We also explain how other frameworks, such as microformats, can be made CC REL compliant. Finally, we discuss specific use cases and the types of tools we hope to see built to take advantage of CC REL.

1. Background on Creative Commons recommendations

6Creative Commons was publicly launched in December 2002, but its genesis traces to the summer of 2000 and discussions about how to promote a reasonable and flexible copyright regime for the Internet in an environment where copyright had become unreasonable and inflexible. There was no standard legal means for creators to grant limited rights to the public for online material, and obtaining rights often required difficult searches to identify rights-holders and burdensome transaction costs to negotiate permissions. As digital networks dramatically lowered other costs and engendered new opportunities for producing, consuming, and reusing content, the inflexibility and costs of licensing became comparatively more onerous.

7Over the following year, CC’s founders came to adopt a two-pronged response to this challenge. One prong was legal and social: create widely applicable licenses that permit sharing and reuse with conditions, clearly communicated in human-readable form. The other prong called for leveraging digital networks themselves to make licensed works more reusable and easy to find; that is, to lower search and transaction costs for works whose copyright holders have granted some rights to the public in advance. Core to this technical component is the ability for machines to detect and interpret the licensing terms as automatically as possible. Simple programs should thus be able to answer questions like:

  • Under what license has a copyright holder released her work, and what are the associated permissions and restrictions?
  • Can I redistribute this work for commercial purposes?
  • Can I distribute a modified version of this work?
  • How should I assign credit to the original author?

8Equally important is constructing a robust user-machine bridge for publishing and detecting structured licensing information on the Web, and stimulating the emergence of tools that lower the barriers to collaboration and remixing. For example, if a webpage contains multiple images, not all licensed identically, can users easily determine which rights are granted on a particular image? Can they easily extract this image, create derivative works, and distribute them while assigning proper credit to the original author? In other words, is there a clear and usable connection between what the user sees and what the machine parses? CC REL aims to be a standard that implementors can follow in creating tools that make these operations simple.

1.1 Creative Commons and RDF

  • 5 The Semantic Web Activity is a large collaborative effort led by the W3C aimed at extending the We (...)

9As early as fall 2001, CC had settled on the approach of creating machine-readable licenses based on the World Wide Web Consortium’s then-emerging Resource Description Framework (RDF), part of the W3C Semantic Web Activity.5

10The motivation for choosing RDF in 2001, and for continuing to use it now, is strongly connected to the CC vision: promoting scholarly and cultural progress by making it easy for people to share their creations and to collaborate by building on each other’s work. In order to lower barriers to collaboration, it is important that the machine expression of licensing information and other metadata be interoperable. Interoperability here means not only that different programs can read particular metadata properties, but also that vocabularies—sets of related properties—can evolve and be extended. This should be possible in such a way that innovation can proceed in a distributed fashion in different communities—authors, musicians, photographers, cinematographers, biologists, geologists, and so on—so that licensing terms can be devised by local communities for types of works not yet envisioned. It is also important that potential extensions be backward compatible: existing tools should not be disrupted when new properties are added. If possible, existing tools should even be able to handle basic aspects of new properties. This is precisely the kind of ”interoperability of meaning” that RDF is designed to support.

1.1.1 RDF triples

  • 6 The term URI (universal resource identifier) is a generalisation of URL (universal resource locato (...)

11RDF is a framework for describing entities on the Web. It provides exceptionally strong support for interoperability and extensibility. All entities in RDF are named using a simple, distributed, globally addressable scheme already well known to Web users: the URL, and its generalisation the URI.6

12For example, Lawrence Lessig’s blog, a document identified by its URL http://lessig.org/blog, is licensed under the CC Attribution license. That license is also a document, identified by its own URL http://creativecommons.org/​licenses/​by/​3.0. The property of ”being licensed under”, which we will call ”license” can itself be considered a Web object and identified by a URL. This URL is http://www.w3.org/​1999/​xhtml/​ vocab#license, which refers to a webpage that contains information describing the ”license” property. This particular webpage, maintained by the Web Consortium, is the reference document that describes the vocabulary.7

13Instantiating properties as URLs enables anyone to use those properties to formulate descriptions, or to discover detailed information about an existing property by consulting the page at the URL, or to make new properties available simply by publishing the URLs that describe those properties.

14As a case in point, CC originally defined its own ”license” property, which it published at http://creativecommons.org/​ns#license since no other group had defined in RDF the concept of a copyright license. When the XHTML Working Group introduced its own license property in 2005, we opted to start using their version, rather than maintain our own CC-dependent notion of license. We were then able to declare that http://creativecommons.org/​ns#license is equivalent to the new property http://www.w3.org/​1999/​xhtml/​vocab#license, simply by updating the description at http://creativecommons.org/​ns#license. Importantly, RDF makes this equivalence interpretable by programs, not just humans, so that ”old” RDF license declarations can be automatically interpreted using the new vocabulary.

15In general, atomic RDF descriptions are called triples. Each triple consists of a subject, a property, and a value for that property of the subject. The triple that describes the license for Lessig’s blog could be represented graphically as shown in Figure 1: a point (the subject) labelled with the blog URL; a second point (the value) labelled with the license URL; and an arrow (the property) labelled with the URL that describes the meaning of the term ”license”, running from the blog to the license. In general, an RDF model, as a collection of triples, can be visualized as a graph of relations among elements, where the edges and vertices are all labelled using URLs.

Figure 1: An RDF Triple represented as an edge between two nodes of a graph

1.1.2 Expressing RDF as text

16Abstract RDF graphs can be expressed textually in various ways. One commonly used notation, RDF/XML, uses XML syntax. In RDF/XML the triple describing the licensing of Lessig’s blog is denoted:

17One desirable feature of RDF/XML notation is that it is completely self-contained: all identifiers are fully qualified URLs. On the other hand, RDF/XML notation is extremely verbose, making it cumbersome for people to read and write, especially if no shorthand conventions are used. Even this simple example (verbose as it is) uses a shorthand mechanism: the second line of the description beginning xmlns:xhtml defines ”xhtml: ” to be an abbreviation for http://www.w3.org/​1999/​xhtml/​vocab#, thus expressing the license property in its shorter form, xhtml:license, on the fourth line.

  • 8 N3 (Notation 3) was designed to be a compact and more readable alternative to RDF/ XML. See http:/ (...)

18Since the introduction of RDF, the Web Consortium has developed more compact alternative syntaxes for RDF graphs. For example the N3 syntax would denote the above triple more concisely:8 <http://lessig.org/​blog>

19We could also rewrite this using a shorthand as in the RDF/XHTML example above, defining: xhtml: as an abbreviation for http://www.w3.org/​1999/​ xhtml/vocab#:

20The shorthand does not provide improved compactness or readability if a prefix is only used once as above. In N3, prefixes are typically defined only when they are used more than once, for example to express multiple properties taken from the same vocabulary. In RDF/XML, because of the stricter parsing rules of XML, there is a bit less flexibility: predicates can only be expressed using the shorthand, while subjects can only be expressed using the full URI.

1.2 CC’s previous recommendation: RDF/XML in HTML comments

21With its first unveiling of machine-readable licenses in 2002, CC recommended that publishers use the RDF/XML syntax to express license properties. The CC website included a Web-based license generator, where publishers could answer a questionnaire to indicate what kind of license they wanted, and the generator then provided RDF/XML text for them to include on their webpages, inside HTML comments:

22We knew at the time that this was a cumbersome design, but there was little alternative. RDF/XML, despite its verbosity, was the only standard syntax for expressing RDF. Worse, the Web Consortium’s Semantic Web Activity was focused on providing organisations with ways to annotate databases for integration into the Web, and it paid scant attention to the issues of intermixing semantic information with visible Web elements. A task force had been formed to address these issues, but there was no W3C standard for including RDF in HTML pages.

23One consequence of CC’s limited initial design is that, although millions of webpages now include CC licenses and metadata, there is no uniform, extensible way for tool developers to access this metadata, and the tools that do exist rely on ad-hoc techniques for extracting metadata.

24Since 2004, CC has been working with the Web Consortium to create more straightforward and less limited methods of embedding RDF in HTML documents. These new methods are now making their way through the W3C standards process. Accordingly, CC no longer recommends using RDF/ XML in HTML comments for specifying licensing information. This chapter supersedes that recommendation. We hope that the new CC REL standard presented in here will result in a more consistent and stable platform for publishers and tool builders to build upon Creative Commons licenses.

2. The CC REL abstract model

25This section describes CC REL, CC’s new recommendation for machine-readable licensing information, in its abstract form, i.e., independent of any concrete syntax. As an abstract specification, CC REL consists of a small but extensible set of RDF properties that should be provided with each licensed object. This abstract specification has evolved since the original introduction of CC properties in 2002, but it is worth noting that all first-generation licenses are still correctly interpretable against the new specification, thanks in large part to the extensibility properties of RDF itself.

26The abstract model for CC REL distinguishes two classes of properties: work properties describe aspects of specific works, including under which license a work is distributed; and license properties describe aspects of licenses.

27Publishers will normally be concerned only with work properties: this is the only information publishers provide to describe a work’s licensing terms. License properties are used by CC itself to define the authoritative specifications of the licenses we offer. Other organisations are free to use these components for describing their own licenses. Such licenses, although related to CC licenses, would not themselves be CC licenses nor would they be endorsed necessarily by CC.

2.1 Work Properties

28A publisher who wishes to license a work under a CC license must, at a minimum, provide one RDF triple that specifies the value of the work’s license property (i.e. the license that governs the work), for example: <http://lessig.org/​blog xhtml:license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/<.">http://creativecommons.org/​licenses/​by/​3.0/​.> dc:title ”The Lessig Blog”.<

29The specific work properties illustrated here are:

  • dc:title—the document’s title. Here dc: is shorthand for the Dublin Core vocabulary defined at http://purl.org/​dc/​terms and maintained by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.9
  • cc:attributionName—the name to cite when giving attribution when the work is modified or redistributed under the terms of the associated CC license.10 The prefix cc:, as mentioned above, is an abbreviation for http://creativecommons.org/​ns#.
  • cc:attributionURL—the URL to link to when providing attribution.
  • dc:type—the type of the licensed document. In this example, the associated value is dcmitype:Text, which indicates text. Lessig’s blog sometimes includes video, in which case the type would be dcmitype:MovingImage. Recommended use of dc:type is explained at http://dublincore.org/​documents/​dces. Individual types like dcmitype:Text and dcmitype:MovingImage are part of the DCMI Vocabulary.

30Incidentally, the above list of four triples could be alternately expressed using the N3 semicolon convention, which indicates a list of triples that all have the same subject:

31There are two more Work properties available to publishers of CC material:

  • dc:source—indicates the original source of modified work, specified as a URI, for example:
  • cc:morePermissions—indicates a URL that gives information on additional permissions beyond those specified in the CC license. For example, a document with a CC license that requires attribution, might, under certain circumstances, be usable without attribution. Or a document restricted to non-commercial use could be available for commercial use under certain conditions. A typical use would then be:

32The information at the designated URL is completely up to the publisher, as are the terms of the associated additional permissions, with one proviso: the additional permissions must be additional permissions, i.e., they cannot restrict the rights granted by the CC license. Said another way, any use of the work that is valid without taking the morePermissions property into account, must remain valid after taking morePermissions into account.

33This is the current set of CC REL work properties. New properties may be added over time, defined by CC or by others. Observe that CC REL inherits the underlying extensibility of RDF—all that is required to create new properties is to include additional triples that use these. For example, a community of photography publishers could agree to use an additional photoResolution property, and this would not disrupt the operation of pre-existing tools, so long as the old properties remain available. We will see below that the concrete syntax (RDFa) recommended by CC for CC REL enjoys this same extensibility property.

34Distributed creation of new properties notwithstanding, only CC can include new elements in the cc: namespace, because it controls the defining document at http://creativecommons.org/​ns#. The ability to retain this kind of control, without loss of extensibility, is a direct consequence of using RDF.

2.2 License Properties

35We now consider properties used for describing licenses. With CC REL, CC does not expect publishers to use these license properties directly, or even to deal with them at all.

36In contrast, CC’s original metadata recommendation encouraged publishers to provide the license properties with every licensed work. This design was awkward, because once a publisher has already indicated which license governs the work, specifying the license properties in addition is redundant and thus error prone. The CC REL recommendation does away with this duplication and leaves it to CC to provide the license properties.

37Tool builders, on the other hand, should take these license properties into account so that they can interpret the particulars of each CC license. The license properties governing a work will typically be found by URL-based discovery. A tool examining a work notices the xhtml:license property and follows the indicated link to a page for the designated license. Those license description pages—the ”Creative Commons Deeds”—are maintained by CC, and include the license properties in the CC-recommended concrete syntax (RDFa), as described in section 7.2:

38Here are the license properties defined as part of CC REL:

  • cc:permits—permits a particular use of the work above and beyond what default copyright law allows.
  • cc:prohibits—prohibits a particular use of the work, specifically affecting the scope of the permissions provided by cc:permits (but not reducing rights granted under copyright).
  • cc:requires—requires certain actions of the user when enjoying the permissions given by cc:permits.
  • cc:jurisdiction—associates the license with a particular legal jurisdiction.
  • cc:deprecatedOn—indicates that the license has been deprecated on the given date.
  • cc:legalCode—references the corresponding legal text of the license.

39Importantly, CC does not allow third parties to modify these properties for existing CC licenses. That say that publishers may certainly use these properties to create new licenses of their own, which they should host on their own servers, and not represent as being CC licenses.

40The possible values for cc:permits, i.e. the possible permissions granted by a CC license, are:

  • cc:Reproduction—copying the work in various forms.
  • cc:Distribution—redistributing the work.
  • cc:DerivativeWorks—preparing derivatives of the work.

41The possible values for cc:prohibits, i.e. possible prohibitions that modulate permissions (but do not affect permissions granted by copyright law, such as fair use), are:

  • cc:CommercialUse—using the work for commercial purposes.

42The possible values for cc:requires are:

  • cc:Notice—providing an indication of the license that governs the work.
  • cc:Attribution—giving credit to the appropriate creator.
  • cc:ShareAlike—when redistributing derivative works of this work, using the same license.
  • cc:SourceCode—when redistributing this work (which is expected to be software when this requirement is used), source code must be provided.

43For example, the Attribution Share-Alike v3.0 Creative Commons

  • 11 Caveat: The text descriptions of these property values are indicative only. The precise legal inte (...)

44license is described as:11 @prefix cc: http://creativecommons.org/​ns#.

45As new copyright licenses are introduced, CC expects to add new permissions, requirements, and prohibitions. However, it is unlikely that CC will introduce new license property types beyond permits, requires and prohibits. As a result, tools built to understand these three property types will be able to interpret future licenses, at least by listing the license’s permissions, requirements, and prohibitions: thanks to the underlying RDF framework of designating properties by URLs, these tools can easily discover human-readable descriptions of these as-yet-undefined property values.

3. Desiderata for concrete CC REL syntaxes

46While the previous examples illustrate CC REL using the RDF/XML and N3 notations, CC REL is meant to be independent of any particular syntax for expressing RDF triples. To create compliant CC REL implementations, publishers need only to arrange that tool builders can extract RDF triples for the relevant CC REL properties—typically only the work properties, since CC provides the license properties—through a discoverable process. We expect that different publishers will do this in different ways, using syntaxes of their choice that take into account the kinds of environments they would like to provide for their users. In each case, however, it is the publisher’s responsibility to associate their pages with appropriate extraction mechanisms and to arrange for these mechanisms to be discoverable by tool builders.

47CC also recommends concrete CC REL syntaxes that tool builders should recognise by default, so that publishers who do not want to be explicitly concerned with extraction mechanisms have a clear implementation path. These recommended syntaxes—RDFa for HTML webpages, and XMP for free-floating content—are described in the following sections. This section presents the principles underlying our recommendations.

3.1 Principles for HTML

48Licensing information for a Web document will be expressed in some form of HTML. What properties would an ideal HTML syntax for expressing CC terms exhibit? Given the use cases we have observed over the past several years, we can call out the following four desiderata.

49Independence and Extensibility: We cannot know in advance what new kinds of data we will want to integrate with CC licensing data. Currently, we already need to combine CC properties with simple media files (sound, images, videos) and there is a growing interest in providing markup for complex scientific data (biomedical records, experimental results). Therefore, the means of expressing the licensing information in HTML should be extensible: it should enable the reuse of existing data models and the addition of new properties, both by CC and by others. Adding new properties should not require extensive coordination across communities or approval from a central authority. Tools should not suddenly become obsolete when new properties are added, nor when existing properties are applied to new kinds of data sets.

50DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself): An HTML document often already displays the name of the author and a clickable link to a CC license. Providing machine-readable structure should not require duplicating this data in a separate format. Notably, if the human-clickable link to the license is changed, for example, from v2.5 to v3.0, a machine processing the page should automatically note this change without the publisher having to update another part of the HTML file to keep it ”in sync” with the human-readable portion.

51Visual Locality: An HTML page may contain multiple items, for example a dozen photographs, each with its own structured data and a different license. It should be easy for tools to associate the appropriate structured data with their corresponding visual display.

52Remix Friendliness: It should be easy to copy an item from one document and paste it into a new document with all appropriate structured data included. In a world where we constantly remix old content to create new content, copy-and-paste, widgets, and sidebars are crucial elements of the remixable Web. As much as possible, CC REL should allow for easy copy-and-paste of data to carry along the appropriate licensing information.

3.2 Desiderata for Free-Floating Content

53Some important works are not typically conveyed via HTML. Examples are MP3s, MPEGs, and other media files. The technique for embedding licensing data into these files should achieve the following design principles.

54Consistency: There are many different possible file types. The mechanism for embedding licensing information should be reasonably generic, so that a single tool can read and write the licensing information without requiring awareness of all file types.

55Publisher Accountability: It can be difficult to provide for accountability of licensing metadata when files are shared in peer-to-peer systems, rather than distributed from a central location. The method for expressing metadata should facilitate providing publisher accountability at least as strong as the accountability of a webpage with a well-defined host and owner.

56Simplicity: The process of embedding licensing information should require little more than a simple and free program. In particular, though complex publisher accountability approaches involving digital signatures and certificates can be used, they should not be required for the basic use case.

4. Including CC REL information in webpages

  • 12 It is worth noting that, while the xhtml:license property has long been a part of the CC specifica (...)

57Consider the abstract model for CC REL. Here, again, are the triples from the example of Lessig’s blog, expressed in N3:12 @prefix xhtml: <http://www.w3.org/​1999/​xhtml#>.

58The webpage to which this information refers typically already contains some HTML that describes this same information (redundantly), in human-readable form, for example:

59What we would like is a way to quickly augment this HTML with just enough structure to enable the extraction of the RDF triples, using the DRY principle articulated above: the existing markup and links should be used both for human and machine readability.

4.1 RDFa and concrete syntax for Work properties

60RDFa was designed by the W3C with CC’s input. The design was motivated in part by the principles noted above. Using existing HTML properties and a handful of new ones, RDFa enables a chunk of HTML to express RDF triples, reusing the content wherever possible. For example, the HTML above would be extended by including additional attributes within the HTML anchor tags, as follows:

61The rules for understanding the meaning of the above markup are:

  • about defines the subject of all triples within the <div>. Here we have about=””, which defines the subject to be the URL of the current document.
  • xmlns:cc associates, throughout the <div>, the prefix cc with the URL http://creativecommons.org/​ns#, much as N3 does with @prefix.
  • property generates a new triple with predicate cc:attributionName, and the text content of the element, in this case ”Lawrence Lessig”, as the object.
  • rel=”cc:attributionURL” generates a new triple with predicate cc:attributionURL, and the URL in the href as the object.
  • rel=”license” generates a new triple with predicate xhtml:license, as xhtml is the default prefix for reserved XHTML values like license. The object is given by the href.

62The fragment of HTML (within the div) is entirely self-contained (and thus remix-friendly). Its meaning would be preserved if it were copied and pasted into another webpage. The data’s structure is local to the data itself: a human looking at the page could easily identify the structured data by pointing to the rendered page and finding the enclosing chunk of HTML. In addition, the clickable links and rendered author names gain semantic meaning without repeating the core data. Finally, as this is embedded RDF, the extensibility and independence properties of RDF vocabularies are automatically inherited: anyone can create a new vocabulary or reuse portions of existing vocabularies.

63Figure 2: RDFa markup of a Creative Commons license notice, illustrating all the current CC Work properties, including the rendering of this markup in a Web browser

64Of course, one can continue to add additional data, both visible and structured. Figure 2 shows a more complex example that includes all work properties currently supported by CC, including how this HTML+RDFa would be rendered on a webpage. Notice how properties can be associated with HTML spans as well as anchors, or in fact with any HTML elements—see the RDFa specification for details.

65The examples in this section illustrate how publishers can specify work properties. One can also use RDFa to express license properties. This is what CC does with the license description pages on its own site, as described below in section 7.2.

4.2 Microformats

66Microformats are a set of simple, open data formats ”designed for humans first and machines second” (http://microformats.org/​about). They provide domainspecific syntaxes for annotating data in HTML. At the moment, the two widely deployed ”compound” microformats annotate contact information (hCard) and calendar events (hCal). Of the ”elemental” microformats, those meant to annotate a single data point, the most popular is rel-tag, used to denote a ”tag” on an item such as a blog post. Another elemental microformat is rel-license, which is meant to indicate the current page’s license and which, conveniently, uses a syntax which overlaps with RDFa: rel=”license”. Other microformats may, over time, integrate CC properties, for example, when licensing images, videos and other multimedia content.13

67Microformat designers have focused on simplicity and readability, and CC encourages publishers who use microformats to make it easy for tool builders to extract the relevant CC REL triples. Nonetheless, microformats’ syntactic simplicity comes at the cost of independence and extensibility, which makes them limited from the CC perspective.

68For example, every time a CC license needs to be expressed in a new context—for example, as videos instead of still images—a new microformat and syntax must be designed, and all parsers must then, somehow, become aware of the change. It is also not obvious how one might combine different microformats on a single webpage, given that the syntax rules may differ and even conflict from one microformat to the next.14 Finally, when it comes time to express complex data sets with ever expanding sets of properties (for example, scientific data), microformats do not appear to scale appropriately, given their lack of vocabulary scoping and general inability to mix vocabularies from independently developed sources—the kind of mixing that is enabled by RDF’s use of namespaces.

  • 15 Profile URLs indicate that the HTML file can be interpreted according to the rules of that profile (...)

69Thus, CC does not recommend any particular microformat syntax for CC REL, but we do recommend a method for ensuring that, when publishers use microformats, tool builders can extract the corresponding CC REL properties: use an appropriate profile URL in the header of the HTML document.15 This profile URL significantly improves the independence and extensibility of microformats by ensuring that the tools can find the appropriate parser code for extracting the CC REL abstract model from the microformat, without having to know about all microformats in advance. One downside is that the microformat syntax then becomes less remix-friendly, with two disparate fragments: one in the head to declare the profile, and one in the body to express the data. Even so, the profile approach is likely good enough for simple data. It is worth noting that this use of a profile URL is already recommended as part of microformats’ best practices, though it is unfortunately rarely implemented today in deployed applications.

4.3 GRDDL for XML Documents

70Not all documents on the web are HTML: one popular syntax for representing structured data in XML. Given that XML is a machine-readable syntax, often with a strict schema depending on the type of data expressed, not all of the principles we outlined are useful here. In particular, visual locality is not relevant when the reader is a machine rather than a human, and remix-friendliness does not apply when XML fragments are rarely remixable in the first place, given schema validation. Thus, we focus on independence and extensibility, as well as DRY.

71When publishing CC licensing information inside an XML document, CC recommends exposing a mechanism to extract the CC REL abstract model from the XML, so that CC tools need not know about every possible XML schema ahead of time. The W3C’s GRDDL recommendation performs exactly this task by letting publishers specify, either in each XML document or once in an XML schema, an XSL Transformation that extracts RDF/XML from XML.16 Consider, for example, a small extension of the Atom XML publishing schema for news feeds:17 <entry>

72An appropriate XSL transform can easily process this data to extract the CC REL property that specifies the license:

73Similarly, the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) defines a complex XML schema for library resources.18 These resources may include megabytes

4.4 Direct RDF/XML embedding in XML

74Because RDF can be expressed using the RDF/XML syntax, one might be tempted to use RDF/XML directly inside an XML document with an appropriate schema definition that enables such direct embedding. This very approach is taken by Scalable Vector Graphics, and there are cases of SVG graphics that include licensing information using directly embedded RDF/XML.19

75This approach can be made CC REL-compliant with very little work—a simple GRDDL transform, declared in the XML schema definition, that extracts the RDF/XML and expresses it on its own. Note that, for CC REL compliance, this transform, although simple, is necessary. The reason for its necessity goes to the crux of the CC REL principles: without such a transform provided by each XML schema designer, tools would have to be aware of all the various XML schemas that include RDF/XML in this way. For extensibility and future-proofing, CC REL asks that publishers of the schema make the effort to provide the extraction mechanism. With explicit extraction mechanisms, publishers have a little bit more work to do, while tool builders are immediately empowered to create generic programs that can process data they have never seen before.

5. Embedding CC REL in free-floating files

76We turn to the precise CC recommendation for embedding CC REL metadata inside MP3s, Word documents, and other ”free-floating” content that is often passed around in a peer-to-peer fashion, via email or P2P networks. We note that there are two distinct issues to resolve: expressing the abstract model using a specific syntax and embedding; and providing minimal accountability for the expressed CC REL data.

77We handle accountability for free-floating content by connecting any free-floating document to a webpage, and placing the CC REL information on that webpage. Thus, publishers of free-floating content are just as accountable as publishers of web-based content: rights are always expressed on a webpage. The connection between the webpage and the binary file it describes is achieved using a cryptographic hash (fingerprint) of the file. For example, the PDF file of Lessig’s ”Code v2” will contain a reference to http:// codev2.cc/download+remix, which itself will contain a reference to the SHA1 hash of the PDF file. The owner of the URL http://codev2.cc/​download+remix is thus taking responsibility for the CC REL statements it makes about the file.

78For expression, we recommend XMP. XMP has the broadest support of any embedded metadata format (perhaps it is the only such format with anything approaching broad support) across many different media formats. With the exception of media formats where a workable embedded metadata format is already ubiquitous (e.g. MP3), CC recommends adopting XMP as an embedded metadata standard and using the following two fields in particular:

  • Web reference: value of xapRights:WebStatement
  • License: value of cc:license

79Consider our example of Lessig’s ”Code v2”, a CC-licensed, community-edited second version of his original ”Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace”. The PDF of this book, available at http://pdf.codev2.cc/​ Lessig-Codev2.pdf, contains XMP metadata as follows:

80Notice how this is RDF/XML, including a xapRights: WebStatement pointer to the webpage http://codev2.cc/​download+remix, which itself contains RDFa:

81This RDFa references the PDF using its SHA1 hash—a secure fingerprint of the file that matches only the given PDF file—and declares its CC license. Thus, anyone that finds the ”Code v2” PDF can find its WebStatement pointer, look up that URL, verify that it properly references the file via its SHA1 hash, and confirm the file’s CC license on the web-based deed.

6. Examples and use cases

82This section describes several examples, first by publishers of CC-licensed works, then by tool builders who wish to consume the licensing information. Some of these examples include existing, real implementations of CC REL, while others are potential implementations and applications we believe would significantly benefit from CC REL.

6.1 How publishers can use CC REL

83Publishers can mix CC REL with other markup with great flexibility. As a result of CC REL’s ”independence and extensibility” principle, publishers can use CC REL descriptions in combination with additional attributes taken from other publishers, or with entirely new attributes they define for their own purposes. And CC REL’s ”DRY” principle means that even small publishers get the benefit of updating data in one location and automatically keeping the human- and machine-readable in sync.

Figure 3: Markup for a Bitmunk Song: this is a real excerpt of the actual
HTML markup used on bitmunk.com, slightly simplified and
indented for readability.

6.1.1 Mixing content with different licenses

84A common use case for web publishers working in a mashup-friendly world is the issue of mixing content with different licenses. Consider, for example, what happens if Lessig’s blog reuses an image published by another author and licensed for non-commercial use. Recall that the blog is licensed to permit commercial use.

85The HTML markup in this case is straightforward:

86The inner <div> uses the about attribute to indicate that its statements concern the photo in question. A link to the original source is provided using the dc:source property, and a different license pointer is given for this photo using the normal anchor with a rel=”license” attribute.

6.1.2 hAudio

87Bitmunk is a service that supports artists with a legal, copyright-aware, content distribution service. The service needed a mechanism for embedding structured data about songs and albums directly into their webpages, including licensing information, so that browser add-ons might provide additional functionality around the music, for example, comparing the price of a particular song at various online stores. Bitmunk first created a microformat called hAudio. They soon realized, however, that they would be duplicating fields when it came time to define hVideo, and that these duplicated fields would no longer be compatible with those of hAudio. More immediately problematic, hAudio’s basic fields, like the title field, would not be compatible with other ”title” fields of other microformats.

88Thus, Bitmunk created the hAudio RDFa vocabulary. The design process for this vocabulary immediately revealed separate, logical components: Dublin Core for basic properties (such as title), CC for licensing, a new vocabulary called ”hMedia” for media-specific properties (such as duration), and a new vocabulary called ”hCommerce” for transaction-specific properties (such as price). Bitmunk was thus able to reuse two existing vocabularies and add features. It was also able to clearly delineate logical components to make it particularly easy for other vocabulary developers to reuse only certain components of the hAudio vocabulary, for example, hCommerce. Meanwhile, all CC licensing information is still expressible without alteration.

89Figure 3 shows an excerpt of the markup available from Bitmunk at http://bitmunk.com/​view/​media/​6579151. Note that this particular sample is not CC-licensed: it uses standard copyright. A CC-licensed album would be marked up in the same way, with a different license value: Bitmunk was able to develop its vocabulary independent of CC REL, and can now integrate with CC REL simply by adding the appropriate attributes.

Figure 4: A Flickr Photo Page with RDFa: this is an excerpt from a Flickr photo page with small amounts of additional markup to show how one would integrate RDFa. The rendering of the HTML is identical with the added RDFa properties. Note the Flickr machine tag upcoming:event, which references an event at upcoming.org. This machine tag is, in fact, an RDF triple, easily expressed in RDFa alongside existing Flickr information and CC licensing.

6.1.3 Flickr

90Flickr hosts over 200 million CC-licensed images (as of December 2011). Currently Flickr denotes a license on each image’s page with a link to the relevant license qualified by rel=”license”. This ad-hoc convention, encouraged by the microformats effort, was ”grandfathered” into RDFa thanks to the reserved HTML keyword license. Unfortunately, it works only for simple use cases, with a single image on a single page. This approach breaks down when multiple images are viewed on a single page, or when further information, such as the photographer’s name, is required.

91Flickr could significantly benefit from the CC REL recommendations, by providing, in addition to simple license linking:

  • License assertions scoped to the image being licensed.
  • Attribution details.
  • A cc:additionalPermissions reference to commercial licensing brokers and a dc:source reference to parent works.
  • XMP embedding in images themselves.

92In addition, Flickr supports ”machine tags”, where photographers can add metadata about their images using custom properties. Flickr’s machine tags are, in fact, a subset of RDF, which can be represented easily using RDFa. Thus, CC licensing can be easily expressed alongside Flickr’s machine tags using the same technology, without interfering.

93Figure 4 shows how the CC-licensed photo at http://www.flickr.com/​ photos/laughingsquid/2034629532 would be marked up using CC REL, including the machine tag upcoming:event that associates the photo with an event at http://upcoming.org.

Figure 5: Markup for a Nature Precedings article, including how RDFa might be integrated seamlessly into the existing markup. The property nature:tag is used to indicate a Nature-defined way of tagging content, though another vocabulary could easily be used here.

Figure 6: Portions of a Nature Precedings paper, marked up with RDFa. An RDFa-aware browser (in this case any normal browser using the RDFa Bookmarklets) detects the markup, highlighting the title and CC license, and revealing the corresponding RDF triples.

6.1.4 Nature precedings

94Nature, one of the world’s top scientific journals, recently launched a web-only ”precedings” site, where early results can be announced rapidly in advance of full-blown peer review. Papers on Nature Precedings are distributed under a CC license. Like Flickr, Nature Precedings currently uses CC’s prior metadata recommendation: RDF/XML included in an HTML comment. Nature could significantly benefit from the CC REL recommendation, which would let them publish structured CC licensing information in a more robust, more extensible, and more human-readable way.

  • 20 The Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) provides a vocabulary for publi (...)

95Consider, for example, the Nature Preceding paper at http://precedings. nature.com/documents/1290/version/1. Figure 5 shows how the markup at that page can be extended with simple RDFa attributes, using the Dublin Core, CC, FOAF, and PRISM publication vocabularies.20 Notice how any HTML element, including the existing H1 used for the title, can be used to carry RDFa attributes. Figure 6 shows how this page could appear in an RDFa-aware browser.

6.1.5 Scientific data

96Open publication of scientific data on the Internet has begun, with the Nature Publishing Group recently announcing the release of genomic data sets under a CC license.21 Beyond simple licensing, thousands of new metadata vocabularies and properties are being developed to express research results. CC is playing an active role to remove barriers to scientific cooperation and sharing.22 CC is specifically encouraging the creation of RDF-based vocabularies for describing scientific information and is stimulating collaboration among research communities with tools that build on RDF’s extensibility and interoperability.

Figure 7: A simple rendering of a bibliographic entry with extra scientific data.

97As these vocabularies become more widespread, it’s easy to envision uses of CC REL and RDFa that extend the bibliographic and licensing markup to include these new scientific data tags. Tools may then emerge to take advantage of this additional markup, enabling dynamic, distributed scientific collaboration through interoperable referencing of scientific concepts.

98Imagine, for example, an excerpt from a (hypothetical) web-based newsletter about genomics research, which references an (actual) article from BioMed Central Neurosciences, as it might be rendered by a browser (Figure 7). The words ”recent study on rat brains”, and ”CEBP-beta” are clickable links, leading respectively to a webpage for the paper, and a webpage that describes the protein CEBP-5#5 in the Uniprot protein database.

99The RDFa generating this excerpt could be:

100This RDFa not only links to the paper in the usual way, but it also provides machine-readable information that this is a statement about inflammatory stimuli (as defined by the Open Biomedical Ontologies initiative) activating expression of the CEPB protein (as specified in the UniProt database of proteins). Since the URI of the protein is visually meaningful, it can be marked up with a clickable link that also provides the object of a triple.

6.1.6 Additional permissions

101A CC license grants certain permissions to the public; others may be available privately. A coarse-grained ”more permissions” link indicates this availability. Creative Commons has branded this scheme CC+. Also, since CC licenses are non-exclusive, other options for a work may be offered in addition to a CC license. Here is an example from http://magnatune.com, showing the use of RDFa to annotate the standard CC license image and also the Magnatune logo:

102This snippet contains two statements: the public CC license and the availability of more permissions. Sophisticated users of this protocol will one day publish company, media, or genre-specific descriptions of the permissions available privately at the target URL. Tools built to recognise a CC license will still be able to detect the license after the addition of the morePermissions property, which is exactly the desired behavior. More sophisticated versions of the tools could inform the user that ”more permissions” may be granted by following the indicated link.

Figure 8: Part of the HTML code for the Creative Commons Attribution, No Derivatives Deed (slightly simplified for presentation purposes) showing the use of CC REL License Properties.

6.2 Publishing license properties

103CC does not expect content publishers to deal with license properties. However, others may find themselves publishing licenses using CC REL’s license properties. Here, too, RDFa is available as a framework for creating license descriptions that are human-readable, from which automated tools can also extract the required properties.

104One example of this is CC itself, and the publication of the ”Commons Deeds”. Figure 8 shows the HTML source of the webpage at http://creativecommons.org/​licenses/​by-nd/​3.0/​us/​ which describes the US version of the CC Attribution-NoDerivatives license.23 As this markup shows, any HTML attribute, including LI, can carry RDFa attributes. The href attribute, typically used for clickable links, can be used to indicate a structured relation, even when the element to which it is attached is not an HTML anchor.

105In this markup, the ”Attribution-NoDerivatives” license permits distribution and reproduction, while requiring attribution and notice. Recall that CC REL is meant to be interpreted in addition to the baseline copyright regulation. In other words, the restriction ”NoDerivatives” is not expressed in CC REL, since that is already a default in copyright law. The opposite, where derivative works are allowed, would be denoted with an additional CC permission.

106Tool builders who then want to extract RDF from this page can do so using, for example, the W3C’s RDFa Distiller,24 which, when given the CC Deed URL http://creativecommons.org/​licenses/​by-nd/​3.0/​, produces the RDF/XML serialisation of the same structured data, ready to be imported into any programming language with RDF/XML support:

6.3 How Tool Builders Can Use CC REL

6.3.1 MozCC

107MozCC is an extension to Mozilla-based browsers for extracting and displaying metadata embedded in webpages.25 MozCC was initially developed in 2004 as a work-around to some of the deficiencies in the prior CC metadata recommendation. That version of MozCC specifically looked for CC RDF in HTML comments, a place most other parsers ignore. Once the metadata is detected, MozCC provided users with a visual notification, via icons in the status bar, of the CC license. In addition, MozCC provided a simple interface to expose the work and license properties.

108Since the initial development, MozCC has been rewritten to provide general purpose extraction of all RDFa metadata, as well as a specialised interface for CC REL. The status-bar icons and detailed metadata visualisation features have been preserved and expanded. A MozCC user receives immediate visual cues when he encounters a page with RDFa metadata, including specific CC-branded icons when the metadata indicates the presence of a CC license. The experience is pictured in Figure 9.

Figure 9: The MozCC Mozilla Add-On. The status bar shows a CC icon that indicates to the user that the page is CC-licensed. A click on the icon reveals the detailed metadata in a separate window.

109MozCC processes pages by listening for load events and then calling one or more metadata extractors on the content. Metadata extractors are JavaScript classes registered on browser startup; they may be provided by MozCC or other extensions. MozCC ships with extractors for all current and previous CC metadata recommendations, in particular CC REL. Each registered extractor is called for every page. The extractors are passed information about the page to be processed, including the URL and whether the page has changed since it was last processed. This allows individual extractors to determine whether re-processing is needed. The RDFa extractor, for example, can stop processing if it sees the document has not been updated. An extractor which looks for metadata specified in external files via <link> tags, however, would still retrieve them and see if they have been updated.

110The results of each extractor are stored in a local metadata store. In the case of Firefox, this is a SQLite database stored as part of the user’s profile. The local metadata store serves as an abstraction layer between the extractors and user interface code. The contents are visible through the Page Info interface. The current software only exposes this information as status bar icons; one can imagine other user interfaces (provided by MozCC or other extensions) that expose the metadata in different ways.

6.3.2 Operator

  • 26 See https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/operator.²

111Operator is an add-on to the Firefox browser that detects microformats and RDFa in the webpages a user visits.26 Operator can be extended with ”action scripts” that are triggered by specific data found in the webpage. The regions of the page that contain data are themselves highlighted so that users can visually detect and receive contextual information about the data.

112It is relatively straightforward to write a CC action script that finds all CC-licensed content inside a webpage by looking for the RDFa syntax. This allows users to easily identify their rights and responsibilities when reusing content they find on the Web. The simple action script can detect all items, even types of items with properties currently unanticipated, and display the item’s name and rights description.

  • 27 Operator currently does not handle HTML reserved keywords, such as rel=”license”. Thus, we conside (...)

113Putting aside for now the definition of some utility functions, an action handler for the license property is declared as follows:27

114Once this action script is enabled, Operator automatically lights up CC-licensed ”Resources” it finds on the web. For example, browsing to Lessig’s blog, Operator highlights two resources that are CC-licensed: the blog itself, and a CC-licensed photo used in one of its posts. The result is shown in Figure 10.

Figure 10: Operator with a CC action script on Lessig’s blog. Notice the two resources, each with its ”view license” action.

7. Conclusion

115Creative Commons wants to make it easy for artists and scientists to build upon the works of others when they choose to: licensing your work for reuse and finding properly licensed works to reuse should be easy. To achieve this on the technical front, we have defined CC REL, an abstract model for rights expression based on the W3C’s RDF, and we recommend two syntaxes for web-based and free-floating content: RDFa and XMP, respectively. The major goal of our technological approach is to make it easy to publish and read rights expression data now and in the future, when the kinds of licensed items and the data expressed about them goes far beyond what we can imagine today. By using RDF, CC REL links CC to the fast-growing RDF data interoperability infrastructure and its extensive developer toolset: other data sets can be integrated with CC REL, and RDF technologies (for example, data provenance with digital signatures) can eventually benefit CC REL.

116We believe that the technologies we have selected for CC REL will enable the kind of powerful, distributed technological innovation that is characteristic of the Internet. Anyone can create new vocabularies for their own purposes and combine them with CC REL as they please, without seeking central approval. Just as we did with the legal text of the licenses, we aim to create the minimal infrastructure required to enable collaboration and invention, while letting it flourish as an organic, distributed process. We believe CC REL provides this primordial technical layer that can enable a vibrant application ecosystem, and we look forward to the community’s innovative ideas that can now freely build upon CC REL.

Notes

1 This chapter contains stylistic, formatting, and minor updates of ”ccREL: The Creative Commons Rights Expression Language”, a W3C Member Submission of 1 May 2008 by the authors, available at http://www.w3.org/Submission/ccREL. The authors wish to credit Neeru Paharia, past Executive Director of Creative Commons, for the ”free-floating” content accountability architecture, Manu Sporny, CEO of Bitmunk, for the Creative Commons Operator code, and Aaron Swartz for the original Creative Commons RDF data model and metadata strategy. More broadly, the authors wish to acknowledge the work of a number of W3C groups, in particular all members of the RDF-in-HTML task force (Mark Birbeck, Jeremy Carroll, Michael Hausenblas, Shane McCarron, Steven Pemberton and Elias Torres), the Semantic Web Deployment Working Group chaired by Guus Schreiber and David Wood, and the tireless W3C staff without whom there would be no RDFa, GRDDL, or RDF, and thus no CC REL: Eric Miller, Ralph Swick, Ivan Herman and Dan Connolly.

2 RDF is a language for representing information about resources in the World Wide Web. We provide a short primer in this paper. Also, see the Web Consortium’s RDF website at http://www.w3.org/RDF.

3 By ”publisher” we mean anyone who places CC-licensed material on the Internet. By ”tool builders” we mean people who write applications that are aware of the license information. Example tools might be search programs that filter their results based on specific types of licenses, or user interfaces that display license information in particular ways.

4 RDFa is an emerging collection of attributes and processing rules for extending XHTML to support RDF. See the W3C Working Draft ”RDFa in XHTML: Syntax and Processing” at http://www.w3.org/TR/rdfa-syntax. The ”RDFa Primer: Embedding Structured Data in Web Pages”, may be found at http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer. RDF/XML, described briefly below, is a method for expressing RDF in XML syntax. See ”RDF/ XML Syntax Specification (Revised), ” W3C Recommendation 10 February 2004 at http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf-syntax-grammar. XMP (Extended Metadata Platform) is a labeling technology developed by Adobe, for embedding constrained RDF/XML within documents. See http://www.adobe.com/products/xmp.

5 The Semantic Web Activity is a large collaborative effort led by the W3C aimed at extending the Web to become a universal medium for data exchange, for programs as well as people. See http://www.w3.org/2001/sw.

6 The term URI (universal resource identifier) is a generalisation of URL (universal resource locator). While a URL refers in principle to a resource on the Web, a URI can designate anything named with this universal hierarchical naming scheme. This generality is used in CC REL for items such as downloaded media files.

7 The vocabulary is also referenced in http://www.w3.org/2011/rdfa-context/rdfa-1.1.html, which sets default vocabulary prefixes and terms for RDFa.

8 N3 (Notation 3) was designed to be a compact and more readable alternative to RDF/ XML. See http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Notation3.html.

9 DCMI promotes the widespread adoption of interoperable metadata standards, and maintains a vocabulary of DCMI Metadata Terms. See http://dublincore.org.

10 All current CC licenses require attribution, and give the publisher the option of specifying a URL with attribution information. The cc:attributionURL property is the preferred way to provide this URL in machine-readable form.

11 Caveat: The text descriptions of these property values are indicative only. The precise legal interpretations of the properties can be subtle and even jurisdiction dependent. Consult the full CC licenses (”legal code”) for the actual legal definitions.

12 It is worth noting that, while the xhtml:license property has long been a part of the CC specification, the cc:attributionName and cc:attributionURL properties are new with CC REL. Under the independence and extensibility principle, the solution we select for embedding CC REL in HTML should allow for such extensions without breaking tools that already know about xhtml:license.

13 See http://microformats.org.

14 See http://microformats.org/wiki/grouping-brainstorming for one discussion.

15 Profile URLs indicate that the HTML file can be interpreted according to the rules of that profile. This property has been used by some microformat specifications to indicate, for example, ”this page contains the hCard microformat”. The property is also used by GRDDL for generic HTML transformations to RDF/XML, although this approach to RDF extraction from HTML is not fully compliant with the principles laid out in this paper: it is difficult to tell which image on a page is CC-licensed when the RDF extraction is achieved via GRDDL.

16 Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Languages (GRDDL) (http://www. w3.org/TR/grddl) is a W3C recommendation for linking Web documents to algorithms that extract RDF data from the document.

17 Atom License Extension. See http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4946.

18 See http://www.openarchives.org. of data, sometimes including the entire resource in full text. Using XSLT, one can extract the relevant CC REL information, exactly as above. Using GRDDL, the OAI can specify the XSLT in its XML schema file, so that all OAI documents are automatically transformable to RDF/XML, which immediately conveys CC REL.

19 Scalable Vector Graphics, http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG, a W3C Recommendation for vector graphics expressed using XML.

20 The Publishing Requirements for Industry Standard Metadata (PRISM) provides a vocabulary for publishing and aggregating content from books, magazines, and journals. See http://www.prismstandard.org.

21 See http://www.nature.com/authors/editorial_policies/license.html for details.

22 See http://sciencecommons.org/http://creativecommons.org/science.

23 The full story is a little more complicated. CC initially used the http://web.resource. org/cc namespace, migrating to http://creativecommons.org/ns# for superior human interaction with the vocabulary when it became apparent RDFa would facilitate this. In 2004, the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) approved a ”license” refinement of its ”rights” term (see http://dublincore.org/usage/decisions/2004/2004–01.Rights-terms. shtml). Had http://purl.org/dc/terms/license existed in 2002, CC would not have defined http://web.resource.org/cc/license. Thanks to the extensibility properties of RDF, http://creativecommons.org/ns#license; describes its relationship to each of these other properties.

24 See http://www.w3.org/2007/08/pyRdfa.

25 See http://wiki.creativecommons.org/MozCC.

26 See https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/operator.²

27 Operator currently does not handle HTML reserved keywords, such as rel=”license”. Thus, we consider the script for the property cc:license, and provide examples appropriately adjusted.

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Caption Figure 1: An RDF Triple represented as an edge between two nodes of a graph
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Caption Figure 3: Markup for a Bitmunk Song: this is a real excerpt of the actualHTML markup used on bitmunk.com, slightly simplified andindented for readability.
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Caption Figure 4: A Flickr Photo Page with RDFa: this is an excerpt from a Flickr photo page with small amounts of additional markup to show how one would integrate RDFa. The rendering of the HTML is identical with the added RDFa properties. Note the Flickr machine tag upcoming:event, which references an event at upcoming.org. This machine tag is, in fact, an RDF triple, easily expressed in RDFa alongside existing Flickr information and CC licensing.
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Caption Figure 5: Markup for a Nature Precedings article, including how RDFa might be integrated seamlessly into the existing markup. The property nature:tag is used to indicate a Nature-defined way of tagging content, though another vocabulary could easily be used here.
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Caption Figure 6: Portions of a Nature Precedings paper, marked up with RDFa. An RDFa-aware browser (in this case any normal browser using the RDFa Bookmarklets) detects the markup, highlighting the title and CC license, and revealing the corresponding RDF triples.
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Caption Figure 7: A simple rendering of a bibliographic entry with extra scientific data.
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Caption Figure 8: Part of the HTML code for the Creative Commons Attribution, No Derivatives Deed (slightly simplified for presentation purposes) showing the use of CC REL License Properties.
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Caption Figure 9: The MozCC Mozilla Add-On. The status bar shows a CC icon that indicates to the user that the page is CC-licensed. A click on the icon reveals the detailed metadata in a separate window.
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Caption Figure 10: Operator with a CC action script on Lessig’s blog. Notice the two resources, each with its ”view license” action.
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