Re: [poe] Requirements of Agreement Policies

May I chime in on @vroddon 's considerations with my IPTC-background of photo-related discussions about (international) copyright.
As ODRL should be a standard which can be used in any country worldwide I suggest to have a look at https://www.rightsdirect.com/international-copyright-basics/ - in particular Global copyright section.
The key message "there is no such thing as an international copyright law" tells us we cannot state that there are any global basic rules of copyright ODRL builds on.

My conclusions regarding ODRL:

- What default Rule(s) apply: formally none! A generic legal basic rule is "to change a legal status of a thing this needs an explicit statement" (=> well documented as contract, agreement etc) and in fact "our" understanding of copyright is the one of the Berne Convention - but not all of the 193 UN members have signed it.
- I suggest a property for Policy like basicLegalRules. The object berneConvention indicates "All rights reserved. Rights need to be granted explicitly." (One step deeper: should it be possible to add the copyright rules of a specific country?)

Having a look at the "legal design" of ODRL in the past days raised similar concerns as stated by @simonstey and I support the alternative outline by @larsgsvensson and @riannella reply of 5 June:

- a property should define this policy follows the Berne Convention = all rights reserved, permissions must be granted explicitly.
- I see no real need for a prohibition in a Policy (1./ below) ...
- ... but  I would stick to Permission in a Policy, Rule is too abstract for a quick understanding by ODRL-newbies.
- For an Agreement these ODRL rules should be normative:
- a/ A Policy MUST have one or more Permissions
- b/ Each Permission MUST have an Assigner party and Assignee party (could be a collection).
- c/ Each Permission MUST have an Action = what is granted by this Permission
- d/ Each Permission MUST have a target = the asset the granted action may be applied to.
- e/ Each Permission MAY have one to many Duty(s)
- f/ Each Permission MAY have one to many Constraints
- Use case: a broad use is granted, one of its narrower kinds of use is not granted. Make the broad use the action of the Permission and add a Constraint with a new leftOperand "prohibitedAction", make the narrower use the rightOperand with an operator of eq. 

This design makes an Agreement policy a container for many small contracts (= Permission) granting a use or transferring the ownership - and each Permission includes all basic legal requirements for such an agreement. 
And this design would simplify the use of ODRL as people interested in it asked "if an asset must not be used in a country will this be a constraint or a prohibition" - hm, could be both and this makes evaluating a policy harder.

1) / re @riannella's pointing at "prohibition only" policies. First: both examples are not about digital resources but about actions by humans and ODRL has no intention to express legislation in general - right? And these policies are based on the starting point of legislation on most countries: one can do anything as s/he likes as long as there is no legal rule constraining that.


-- 
GitHub Notification of comment by nitmws
Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/poe/issues/187#issuecomment-306409187 using your GitHub account

Received on Tuesday, 6 June 2017 07:48:45 UTC