Atom License Extension
RFC 4946

[Ballot discuss]
RFC 4287 says:

  Atom allows the use of IRIs [RFC3987].  Every URI [RFC3986] is also
  an IRI, so a URI may be used wherever below an IRI is named.  There
  are two special considerations: (1) when an IRI that is not also a
  URI is given for dereferencing, it MUST be mapped to a URI using the
  steps in Section 3.1 of [RFC3987] and (2) when an IRI is serving as
  an atom:id value, it MUST NOT be so mapped, so that the comparison
  works as described in Section 4.2.6.1.

This document says:

  The IRI specified by
  the link's 'href' attribute SHOULD be dereferenceable to return a
  representation of the license.  The license representation MAY be
  machine readable.

That is, this document is specificying derferencable resources which
MUST be mapped to URIs, according RFC 4287.  I believe that this
document would be clearer and implementations more likely to
interoperate if this document stated that the URI form of the IRI
is required.

[Ballot comment]
I have some grief with the how they use the term "machine readable". To me that would imply that there was one or more formats of something were my application could figure out it was allows to say copy this or repost it. The example given does not seem machine readable to me and the document does not reference any machine readable formats or provide a negotiation form for them.

I think the document is lacking an application to be able to interpret the license and if the application can not interpret the license, I see little value (other than saved bandwidth) of this over the  tag.

I don't see the document causing lots of harm - it just looks useless.

IANA Last Call Comments:

Upon approval of this document, the IANA will make a single
addition to the Link Relations registry maintained at:

http://www.iana.org/assignments/link-relations.html

The value:

license

will be added to this registry. IANA understands this to be
the only action required upon approval of this document.