RE: IPTC proposal of a modified action vocab: "license" renamed to "use"

Renato:

 

I have to admit that I'm not familiar with the ODRL 1.1 design, therefore I
cannot include this into my considerations. To outline our approach: while
going over the actions we noticed that some actions apparently have a
narrower definition than another action. Our conclusion: ok, let's design it
like a hierarchical taxonomy which means that a narrower term inherits
semantics from broader terms and using a broader terms is equivalent to
using this term and all its narrower terms.

A good example for that is "use": if a news provider wants to express a
spatial constraint it should be possible to do this in a very general way:
"the Assignee must not use the asset in Country X" - and this exclusion
should cover any kind of using the asset. If we would have to create let's
say 10 Permissions with the same constraint to cover 10 variants of use this
would be not user-friendly.

 

Re the definitions including Assigner and Assignee:

We had a long internal discussion about what a policy is and came to the
conclusion that it simply represents a contract. If we are talking about
rights expressions we have to abide to the basics of legal frameworks and
one of the basics is that all licensing or selling is a contractual action.
(We looked e.g. in this WIPO document
http://www.wipo.int/export/sites/www/freepublications/en/copyright/891/wipo_
pub_891.pdf ) 

And any contract needs at least two parties. 

We have to be aware that ODRL is a representation of the real world but its
machine-readable expressions may not cover everything from the real world.
Therefore it is possible to omit including the machine-readable
representation of an Assigner or an Assignee - but they exist, regardless of
their machine-readable expression, else this would not be a contract.

 

Simple example: if a Creative Commons license is used it may be hard to
write down who exactly the Assignee is and to create an unambiguous
machine-readable expression for him. But the legal code makes clear that
there are two parties involved - see e.g.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode , 3 License Grant
starting with "Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Licensor
hereby grants You a worldwide, royalty-free, ."

The Assigner is the Licensor and the Assignee is You - the person
(potentially) using the asset.

 

As ODRL also includes some actions which are addressing (and therefore
requiring) a third-party we felt that the number of involved parties needs
to be expressed in the definition.

 

Michael

 

From: Renato Iannella [mailto:ri@semanticidentity.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 28, 2014 5:30 AM
To: ODRL Community Group
Subject: Re: IPTC proposal of a modified action vocab: "license" renamed to
"use"

 

 

On 23 Jan 2014, at 03:45, Michael Steidl (IPTC) <mdirector@iptc.org> wrote:

 

In the proposal of a modified action vocabulary with structures and some
changes to definitions on

 <http://www.w3.org/community/odrl/wiki/Vocabulary_Definitions>
http://www.w3.org/community/odrl/wiki/Vocabulary_Definitions

submitted by IPTC in December 2013, we - IPTC - have renamed the action
"license" to "use" as the conclusion from a long discussion was that this
term fits better the need to express "this action addresses any kind of
(permitted = licensed) use of an asset".

 

Back in ODRL V1.1 [1] we grouped all the actions into related categories
(like "usage", "transfer", "asset mgt", "reuse")....should we reconsider
this now (and make those groups actions themselves?)

 

Also, I notice that all/most of the definitions now begins with "The
Assigner permits/prohibits the Assignee(s) to execute the act of..." instead
of "The act of..."

Does this create issues with ODRL policy types that do not have assigners
and/or assignees?

 

Renato

 

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/odrl/