Re: How the father of the World Wide Web plans to reclaim it from Facebook and Google

On Wed, 17 Aug 2016 at 01:35 Anders Rundgren <anders.rundgren.net@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On 2016-08-16 17:19, Timothy Holborn wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Wed, 17 Aug 2016 at 01:14 Steven Rowat <steven_rowat@sunshine.net
> <mailto:steven_rowat@sunshine.net>> wrote:
> >
> >     On 8/16/16 7:38 AM, Timothy Holborn wrote:
> >
> >     > don't need lawyers - just need a 'magna carta for the web', not a
> new
> >     > concept.
> >
> >     Might ODRL, (Open Digital Rights Language), which specifies in detail
> >     the policy of the data's creator/owner, including downstream rights
> >     for usage (commercial, non-commercial, any mix), be something like
> >     that 'magna carta for the web', -- if it was legally binding?
> >
> > I believe the works of ODRL have enormous merit. However, i believe the
> legal mechanism for enabling a legally-binding usage term is via 'license'.
> >
> > Creative commons demonstrates this concept, but not for platform
> licensing.
>
> Tim,
> I must confess that I haven't the faintest idea of what you are talking
> about :-(
>
> Who licenses what from whom, and most important of all, why?
>
>  a bunch of smart people produce a software platform that's designed to
store other peoples data.  Solid [1]  is an example of a group doing that
at the moment, who are producing works such as [2] which can be packaged,
updated, adapted to, and used to build a services platform offering - a bit
like cpanel [3]...

Apache Marmotta[4] is another example of similar underlying works.

It is unlikely humans will be deploying their own storage servers that
support the necessary 'trust' qualities required to keep it secure, and to
operate 'trusted' services upon it.

therefore some sort of 'license agreement' needs to occur between the
vendor of the software, and the organisation operating it in a data-centre
somewhere.

existing open-source licenses do not consider the customer data stored on
server-software operated by service-providers to have declared value or
user-rights; at least not in a manner that is demonstrated for content
assets attributed with Creative Commons RDF[5].

Whilst several forms of license may be supported by a software vendor, such
as a traditional open-source license, or a commercial license; and indeed
penalty clauses for misusing one form of license (by operating outside of
its terms as is otherwise considered by an alternative license, ie: a more
traditional commercial license); this concept of a middle-ground that
better considers the notion of humans having rights to the data they
generate,

is not, as far as i'm aware, supported by any well-known software licensing
framework; and,

I think it is an important counterpart to a broader solutions framework.

I think other methods may exist; however, i've spent quite some time
researching the options and believe a licensing mechanism to harbour
amongst the better frictionless capacities for a user or technology
produced with the best of intentions; to, regardless of their technical
competency,

highlight some sort of well-known concept (as is demonstrated by Creative
Commons broadly) and ask a legal professional to assist them in upholding
their rights as described by the terms of the contract they entered into,
when seeking a safe place to store and make accessible - subject to their
choices - data that is of value to them; whether value means private,
commercially valuable or other concept that denotes something other than
'public domain' or 'automagically sub-licensed to service operator for use,
sale, et.al.'.

Anders
>
> Tim Holborn.

[1] http://solid.mit.edu/
[2] https://github.com/solid/node-solid-server
[3] http://cpanel.com/
[4] http://marmotta.apache.org/
[5] http://labs.creativecommons.org/demos/ns/

> >
> >
> >     Steven
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>