patch to extract license data

[Nathan Kinkade]

2007/11/11, Sam Ruby <rubys at intertwingly.net>:
<snip>
> Meanwhile, I'm test drive a subtle change to the template that I use
> (themes/asf) so that the rights and license information present in the
> feed is visible.  At the bottom of every post is the author information.
>   When this information is present, the simple word "by" will be
> replaced by the (c) character, and it will be associated with a hypertext
> link to the license and/or a mouseover text with the rights information.
>
> You can see an example of the result here:
>
>    http://planet.intertwingly.net/
>
> Any advice you might have on best practices for displaying this
> information is welcome.
>
> - Sam Ruby

Quick question: for your tests above, are you using some of the
changes I made, or has the license info always been extracted and
exposed to the template?  I'll feel silly indeed if I went about
hacking up planet/shell/tmpl.py only to reinvent the wheel.

Re: best practices for displaying licensing information.  I suspect
that it's largely a personal matter.  Of course, Creative Commons
would probably advocate making a more explicit/visible license
declaration in order to disambiguate the issue up front.  Here are a
couple of pages that might be of use:

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Marking_Works_Technical

Again, you can see how we've chosen to implement it at
http://planet.creativecommons.org ... look below the title, next to
author and date.  It's a little verbose for my taste, but that's how I
was asked to make it look.

My only reservation about your tests with the (c) symbol is that it's
not clear that that is a link, and unless a consumer of the feeds
happens to hover their mouse over it, then they are likely to go away
thinking that it's an "All Rights Reserved" affair, which I think is
the common association people have with that symbol.  In any case,
complete copyrights are implicit and don't necessarily need to be
stated.  I think the most important thing is to make it clear when
something has alternative copyrights applied to it.  How one goes
about doing that isn't black and white, but something like "(c), 2007.
Some Rights Reserved" is one idea.

Nathan