Henry Story suggested on the atom-syntax mailing list that it would be very helpful if there were a machine-readable way to express copyright policy on an Atom entry (e.g. via a Creative Commons URI)
This has come up before on this blog in the context of indicating whether one is happy to have an entry linkblogged.
Bob Wyman rightly points out that Creative Commons isn't about DRM in that CC licenses grant rather than restrict rights. A non-commerical CC license doesn't prohibit commercial use, it just grants non-commercial use.
Bob is worried that if Atom provides a way to link to a CC license, people will think that they can restrict the use of their content this way.
But I think not having a way to do this is worse.
Not having a way to restrict rights shouldn't preclude one from having a way to grant rights. As I've mentioned earlier, I don't mind people including the content of my blog in their link blogs with attribution. I don't see any problem with being able to declare that fact in a machine-readable in way my Atom feed. Should people that want to do this be dissuaded from doing so just because others (even the majority) may assume the mechanism allows rights to restricted rather than granted? I don't think so.