The CC schema lets you describe copyright licenses in RDF. Here's a summary of the included terms:
- cc:license
- A copyright license for the resource, a structured cc:License. If there are two cc:licenses, then the licensee gets to pick which to use.
Agents (people or things that do stuff) and Licenses, of course, can use the same structure to provide their names, dates, etc.
Licenses
Licenses are described by their characteristics, which come in three types:
Permissions (rights granted by the license)
- Reproduction
- the work may be reproduced
- Distribution
- the work (and, if authorized, derivative works) may be distributed, publicly displayed, and publicly performed
- DerivativeWorks
- derivative works may be created and reproduced
Prohibitions (things prohibited by the license)
- CommercialUse
- rights may be exercised for commercial purposes
Requirements (restrictions imposed by the license)
- Notice
- copyright and license notices must be kept intact
- Attribution
- credit must be given to copyright holder and/or author
- ShareAlike
- derivative works must be licensed under the same terms as the original work
- SourceCode
- source code (the preferred form for making modifications) must be provided for all derivative works
Note: these characteristics are advisory only. They are designed to describe the characteristics of a license; they are not themselves a license. For the specific implementation of each characteristic, as well as other details which may not be encoded in the RDF, you must consult the text of the actual license. A license should always be linked from these metadata terms.
More details are on the Creative Commons metadata project website.
RDF users might be interested in our machine-readable RDF Schema. A copy is also embedded in this document.