Hello,

I've realized that is it possible to select a license such as "recognition" (and all derivates) but not writing anything in the "attribution" fields. Does that make sense? Is it possible to say that an author's work should be recognized but not saying who the author is? (I'm asking that seriously, since I'm not a lawyer nor expert in licenses) If that's not possible I suggest that when a "recognition" (and all derivates) license is selected the "attribution" field should be set to mandatory so that problem would be prevented.

Regards

Comments

turadg’s picture

turadg commented

That's a good idea. For any of the Attribution licenses, some Attribution value is necessary.

To save users time, we could auto-fill it with the username of the "author" known to Drupal. For the attribution URL, we can use their Drupal user profile page. Later, we can add fields for the user to set their preferred values for these two. (Or are these already in the UI and I forget?)

c-c-m’s picture

c-c-m commented

That could be great.

On the other hand, it doesn't make any sense to set "attribution" as mandatory when no Attribution license is set.

balleyne’s picture

balleyne commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

Ah, good question. As far as I know, The ccAttribution field is certainly not necessary beyond something like a username (e.g. Flickr doesn't collect that metadata). The attribution metadata field is more for customization than anything else.

And I did implement a default to Drupal values much of the metadata towards the end of the summer. It's around line 400 in creativecommons.class.php

The default dc:title is the title of the node, the default cc:attributionName is the author's Drupal username and the default cc:attributionURL is a link to the user's Drupal user page. The default text for dc:type is just 'Work' (i.e. "This Work is licensed under..") -- that's the the CC API uses. These defaults are used at the display stage if the corresponding metadata fields are empty in the database.

Then, at the edit stage, the default values for the form would be loaded either from a user's personal defaults, or if those are empty, from the site defaults (otherwise, it defaults to blank), if I recall correctly.

Part of the reasoning here too... is the awkwardness of the ccREL output. Since the metadata is intertwined with the sentence structure, it's hard to make separate cases for every combination of available metadata, so I opted to use default values as much as possible, so that we can be sure there will be something to output for as many fields as possible.

So, I don't think it's necessary to force a user to enter any attribution metadata. I think it makes more sense to default to Drupal values, like it's doing now.