Dan Brickley wrote:
Raj Singh wrote:
This is a crucial point, and where the rubber really meets the road. How
do we enforce digital rights in an open, interoperable software
environment? Well, we don't have the answer to that yet, but that's our
goal.
And as an industry consortium comprising every type of organization from
commercial, open source, academic, govt. etc, nothing less will do.
Any ideas on how to make rights work within a heterogeneous software
environment is welcome.
---
Raj
I believe the first step is to separate out enforcement from
description. And to tackle the easier, less controversial, and more
universally desired problem first. We all benefit from rights
description technology; it isn't so clear who benefits from enforcement
technology.
The term 'DRM' raises tensions in opensource/opencontent tech circles,
as it is suggestive of heavyweight (and often ill-fated) mechanisms for
enforcement. When I was at W3C there was a move towards adopting
"Digital Rights *Description*" as a name for a smaller, more feasible
and declarative piece of the puzzle. I'm not sure where the terminology
originates, though it's often seen in Creative Commons contexts.
Let's have better digital rights description for geodata, alongside an
analysis of the licensing concepts (Creative Commons in particular) that
are used for such data. Sometimes there will be enough in common with
other forms of data that a geo-specific license might not be needed. But
that even on it's own is a big complex area, especially in an
international context. For example, ... imagine an aggregator mixing
geodata with event listings, or music-related data
(http://musicbrainz.org/papers/mb_license.html), or scientific data
(http://sciencecommons.org/resources/faq/databases.html). Understanding
what terminological concepts can be shared across all such data is
critical to the ability to mix, merge, re-use and re-distribute, but
machine-readable license terms for all this are at such an early stage.
And I suspect, risk being needlessly fragmented if "science", "geodata",
"events" and "music" data licensing initiatives proceed without enough
consideration of overlap and shared (legal/technical) terminology.
The rights *description* piece of work is much smaller, much much more
achieveable, than the rights enforcement piece. Yet even that is a huge
piece of work. Let's start with the "easy" stuff...
cheers,
Dan
Amen, Dan.
The rights enforcement schemes that we have in hand -- civil law, peer
pressure, reputation -- are stronger and less of an impediment to
innovation than any digital enforcement schemes likely to be invented.
Cheers,
Sean
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