Feedback on P&OE draft charter from rightsstatements.org

Dear all,

We have seen with great pleasure the progress made on launching a new group on expressing permissions and obligations and related terms. Our project (rightsstatements.org) is not a W3C member but we wholeheartedly support the effort and hope you will succeed.

We have listed below several comments to the draft charter (in decreasing order of importance),

Best regards

Mark Matienzo & Antoine Isaac, on behalf of the Technical Working Group of the International Rights Statement Working Group

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1. Our working group rightsstatements.org is interested in participating or contributing feedback, and are happy to be listed in section 4.2 (modalities TBD), as a potential 'case owner'. This would be in line with previous interaction with the ODRL group - for example about ways to represent permissions for educational use we had useful discussion about a draft case: https://www.w3.org/community/odrl/wiki/Europeana/DPLA_In_Copyright_-_Educational_Use_Only )

2. Three members of the working group (Mark Matienzo, Tom Johnson, and Antoine Isaac) are also members of the Exposing and Linking Cultural Heritage Data Community Group (https://www.w3.org/community/linkedculture/)

3. In the current POE charter we have noticed that there an emphasis on discovery systems seems to be missing. We believe machine-readable, rights-dedicated metadata will facilitate access to content via services that makes use of them. The draft charter mentions machine-readable metadata, but it is relatively weak. There's one sentence that target "content owners", which gives a good motivation for "publishing", "describing" and somehow "sharing". It would be great if there was a similar sentence for 'content consumers' and maybe 'platforms to distribute and access content'. For us in digital culture this is an important motivation, and it could also apply in other domains.

4. On the sentence "The system should not, however, be the basis of legal compliance or enforcement mechanisms."
-> Why not? We're involved in an initiative whose aim is *not* to the basis of legal compliance or enforcement mechanisms, so fully understand that you wouldn't have a formal requirement on this. But some agencies or copyright holders could still want to make POEs a part of such a mechanism, if the expressiveness of the language matches their needs. Ultimately it's up to creators of the Expression to decide.
Or maybe it's just a problem of interpretation of the "should not" in terms of RFC 2119? If yes, the sentence could be reworded in a way that frees you from any commitment but that leaves the door open to what users of the technology can do with it.

Received on Friday, 22 January 2016 18:11:08 UTC