RE: Generic permissions and prohibitions

I had a discussion with a lawyer who is an expert in copyright and licensing
last week and she pointed at that:

- most copyright laws define as default scenario: the copyright owner owns
all rights and if this copyright owner explicitly grants a specific action
to another party this means that only this action is granted and nothing
else.

- ... but we should be careful: globally only "most" and not "all" copyright
laws set this as default = the ODRL community should not rely on a globally
consistent setting of this context.

- ODRL is apparently open to use cases beyond granting rights regarding a
copyright protected works. In such a case this scenario above "if a specific
action is granted all other actions are not granted" does *not* apply based
on most national laws. (There may be a few laws which define this but that's
not a global trend.)

Therefore I think ODRL has to write down an explicit specification:
- option 1: any action which is not explicitly permitted is not permitted.
(And we should not include into this specification action vocabularies: as
ODRL is open to using any other action than those defined in the ODRL action
vocabulary an undefined set of different actions could be used by an ODRL
policy.)
- option 2: any action, even all those not explicitly permitted, are
permitted, to constrain this a prohibition defining "all actions except
those permitted by this policy are prohibited" must be included into a
policy.

Re Renato's comment below: I feel this is a more a Best Practice than a
specification issue - in fact there are two (or more) valid syntax options
to express a constrained action.
And to add to the example below: in our RightsML examples we recommend a
third syntax options for "action X is permitted everywhere expect in country
B" - http://dev.iptc.org/RightsML-Simple-Example-Geographic
- Permission = action X + Constraint = spatial "notEqual" to country B 

Michael


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Renato Iannella [mailto:ri@semanticidentity.com]
> Sent: Friday, June 06, 2014 3:43 AM
> To: ODRL Community Group (Contrib)
> Subject: Re: Generic permissions and prohibitions
> 
> [This opens a massive can of worms...8-]
> 
> Looking back, we discussed this issue when the V2 Model was being created
> (back in Feb 2005 [1], and the original requirement [2])
> 
> But, it looks like we did not answer/resolve the question. (eg should
> Perms/Prohib be mutually exclusive).
> 
> I think we opted to be silent, as whatever we would have decided, some
> community may have wanted to interpret their polices differently.
> (the perils of being a high-level framework)
> 
> I can certainly see some scenarios where Perms/Prohibs work well
> together....
> For example;
>  Permission = Sell
>  Prohibition = Sell + Constraint = (Spatial = Australia)
> So, when asked can I sell asset X, the answer is "yes, but not in
Australia"
> 
> Now, you can also model that as:
>  Permission = Sell + Constraint = (Spatial = (Australia + Angola +
Antartica +
> Brazil + Canada + Denmark + England + ........))
> But the former is cleaner and less likely to be mis-interpreted.
> 
> 
> Cheers...
> Renato Iannella
> Semantic Identity
> http://semanticidentity.com
> Mobile: +61 4 1313 2206
> 
> [1] http://www.w3.org/2012/09/odrl/archive/odrl.net/2.0/odrl-version2004-
> 2007/2005-February/000038.html
> [2] http://www.w3.org/2012/09/odrl/archive/odrl.net/2.0/issues/issueslist-
> 1_7.html

Received on Monday, 9 June 2014 10:44:58 UTC