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Rh This 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

Creative 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.

Over 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?