Displaying licensing information for images

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Over at the Wired blog they’re pondering on the best way to provide licensing information on images; the author suggests a new attribute for img, something like lic="license-abbr". I think the main problem with this is that it doesn’t provide any information about what that license is, or its terms.

The Microformats solution is rel-license; basically, putting a link to the license description in the rel attribute of a link, as so:

<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/" rel="license">cc by 2.0</a>

This is better, but sometimes you might not want to have a visible link on the page. You can embed license information in the image itself, but this goes too far the other way in terms of visibility. Then there’s the option to place it as a comment in the code; but again, it’s still not immediately visible.

Perhaps a future solution would be to allow the link tag to be used outside the document head, and to contain content; for example:

<link rel="copyright" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/"><img src="image.jpg" alt="An Image" /></link>

If browsers were set to recognise that, there could be some way to display the information when moused over; in the status bar, perhaps.

This is real top of my head stuff, perhaps someone more technical could explain to me if there are any limitations to this approach.

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