Licensing patterns for Linked Data

Rights expression languages declare the permitted and prohibited actions to be performed on a resource. Along this work, six rights expression languages are compared, abstracting their commonalities and outlining their underlying pattern. Linked Data, which can be object of protection by the intellectual property laws or its access be restricted by an access control system, can be the asset in rights expressions. The requirements for a pattern for licensing Linked Data resources are listed

Frames and Overflows in Rights Expression Languages

This paper analyzes the visions, schemas, and vocabularies of prominent rights expression languages, including Creative Commons, METS, ODRL, and MPEG-21. The paper extends Michel Callon's sociological insight that all forms of human agency are multiple and diverse. Callon argues, in the context of economic sociology, that one must constantly decide between a strategy emphasizing "framing" as the norm with "overflows" treated as leaks, or conversely a strategy accepting "overflows" as the norm with "framing" as inherently imperfect. Callon's categories are extended, through a modeling exercise, to the classification of current metadata schemes. The analysis suggests that metadata developers should explore what semantic choices and strictures are left out of metadata schemes, as well as those that are included. Such a thought exercise is especially useful in distinguishing areas suited for XML rights markup extensions

Privacy Issues of the W3C Geolocation API

The W3C's Geolocation API may rapidly standardize the transmission of location information on the Web, but, in dealing with such sensitive information, it also raises serious privacy concerns. We analyze the manner and extent to which the current W3C Geolocation API provides mechanisms to support privacy. We propose a privacy framework for the consideration of location information and use it to evaluate the W3C Geolocation API, both the specification and its use in the wild, and recommend some modifications to the API as a result of our analysis

Licensing Digital Content With A Generic Ontology: Escaping From The Rights Expression Language Jungle

International audienceDigital contents distributed over the internet are regulated by law and by technical management systems. The latter include a semantic component that describes licenses, i.e. rights of use which are granted to the user. These elements of Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems are called Rights Expression Languages (REL), they gather terms and relations needed to build licenses. Some are based on an ontology of online licenses, not necessarily related to applicable law and various legal systems, and cannot interoperate. As a consequence, there is a need for a more generic way to express licenses. Here, generic means that rightholders should only need to express the license they need once, and semi-automatic tools should then translate this license so it can be browsed by any specific system. Hence it implies the necessity to be able to model concept semantics in order to translate a license expressed in generic terms into more specific terms that are compliant with the specific standards used by distribution systems. This work comes as part of larger studies on legal ontologies, legal systems and RELs

Optimising metadata workflows in a distributed information environment

The different purposes present within a distributed information environment create the potential for repositories to enhance their metadata by capitalising on the diversity of metadata available for any given object. This paper presents three conceptual reference models required to achieve this optimisation of metadata workflow: the ecology of repositories, the object lifecycle model, and the metadata lifecycle model. It suggests a methodology for developing the metadata lifecycle model, and illustrates how it might be used to enhance metadata within a network of repositories and services

Linked Democracy

This open access book shows the factors linking information flow, social intelligence, rights management and modelling with epistemic democracy, offering licensed linked data along with information about the rights involved. This model of democracy for the web of data brings new challenges for the social organisation of knowledge, collective innovation, and the coordination of actions. Licensed linked data, licensed linguistic linked data, right expression languages, semantic web regulatory models, electronic institutions, artificial socio-cognitive systems are examples of regulatory and institutional design (regulations by design). The web has been massively populated with both data and services, and semantically structured data, the linked data cloud, facilitates and fosters human-machine interaction. Linked data aims to create ecosystems to make it possible to browse, discover, exploit and reuse data sets for applications. Rights Expression Languages semi-automatically regulate the use and reuse of content. ; Links information flow, social intelligence, rights management, and modelling with epistemic democracy Presents examples of regulatory and institutional desig

Digital Rights Management and Consumer Acceptability: A Multi-Disciplinary Discussion of Consumer Concerns and Expectations

The INDICARE project – the Informed Dialogue about Consumer Acceptability of DRM Solutions in Europe – has been set up to raise awareness about consumer and user issues of Digital Rights Management (DRM) solutions. One of the main goals of the INDICARE project is to contribute to the consensus-building among multiple players with heterogeneous interests in the digital environment. To promote this process and to contribute to the creation of a common level of understanding is the aim of the present report. It provides an overview of consumer concerns and expectations regarding DRMs, and discusses the findings from a social, legal, technical and business perspective. A general overview of the existing EC initiatives shows that questions of consumer acceptability of DRM have only recently begun to draw wider attention. A review of the relevant statements, studies and reports confirms that awareness of consumer concerns is still at a low level. Five major categories of concerns have been distinguished so far: (1) fair conditions of use and access to digital content, (2) privacy, (3) interoperability, (4) transparency and (5) various aspects of consumer friendliness. From the legal point of view, many of the identified issues go beyond the scope of copyright law, i.e. the field of law where DRM was traditionally discussed. Often they are a matter of general or sector-specific consumer protection law. Furthermore, it is still unclear to what extent technology and an appropriate design of technical solutions can provide an answer to some of the concerns of consumers. One goal of the technical chapter was exactly to highlight some of these technical possibilities. Finally, it is shown that consumer acceptability of DRM is important for the economic success of different business models based on DRM. Fair and responsive DRM design can be a profitable strategy, however DRM-free alternatives do exist too.Digital Rights Management; consumers; Intellectual property; business models