Re: License LINK Headers and Linked Data

Leigh et.al., you may be interested in (the great) Henry Perritt's
seminal _1993_ paper "Knowbots, Permissions Headers and Contract Law"
[1]

Prof. Perritt wrote this in the very early days of the Web, when few
people were thinking (clearly) about copyright on the Internet and
fewer still were contemplating making licenses and "offers" easily
obtained and processed by rules-based agents --- his "knowbots."
Leigh's ideas seem very much in that spirit!

John
PS: One can see aspects of Perritt's ideas also in the way Creative
Commons is implemented.

[1] Henry H. Perritt, "Knowbots, Permissions Headers and Contract
Law." Paper for the Conference on Technological Strategies for
Protecting Intellectual Property in the Networked Multimedia
Environment (April 1993). <http://cyber.eserver.org/property.txt>

On Mon, Aug 12, 2013 at 12:14 PM, Leigh Dodds <leigh@ldodds.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> There's one aspect of my document on publishing machine-readable
> rights statements that I want to flag to this community.
>
> Specifically its the section on including references to licence and
> rights statements from LINK headers in HTTP responses:
>
> https://github.com/theodi/open-data-licensing/blob/master/guides/publisher-guide.md#linking-to-rights-statements-from-web-apis
>
> While that information can also be published in RDF, as part of the
> Linked Data response, I think adding LINK headers is very important
> too, for several reasons:
>
> Linked Data applications and browsers will commonly encounter new
> resources and the licensing information should be immediately clear.
> Having this be accessible outside of the response will allow user
> agents to be able to clearly detect licences before they start
> retrieving data from a new source. This will allow users to place
> pre-conditions on what type of data they want to
> harvest/collect/process.
>
> A HEAD request can be made on a resource to check its licensing,
> before data is actually retrieved.
>
> Cheers,
>
> L.
>
> --
> Leigh Dodds
> Freelance Technologist
> Open Data, Linked Data Geek
> t: @ldodds
> w: ldodds.com
> e: leigh@ldodds.com
>



-- 
John S. Erickson, Ph.D.
Director, Web Science Operations
Tetherless World Constellation (RPI)
<http://tw.rpi.edu> <olyerickson@gmail.com>
Twitter & Skype: olyerickson

Received on Monday, 12 August 2013 16:31:28 UTC