Generic permissions and prohibitions

All:

 

I've been asked by lawyers about specific permissions (and prohibitions) and
their relationship to "any other action" in a wide context:

 

Example: a permission to use a photo for printing is granted by an ODRL
policy. This policy includes the single permission and nothing else. 

This raises the question - at least for lawyers: what about all the other
actions in the ODRL vocabulary (and maybe beyond it)? Are they implicitly
prohibited?

 

At first sight I was not able to find a rule for that in the ODRL Data Model
- maybe I missed a paragraph.

 

To solve this issue I see two options:

i/ To write down in the ODRL specs that the default state is: "nothing is
permitted", only explicit permissions lift that. The exact role of a
prohibition in such a context would need a good explanation.

 

Ii/ To define a super-generic "any-other-action" action and to recommend
using this as explicit prohibition with each policy.

 

Thanks for your comments,

 

Michael

 

Michael Steidl

Managing Director of the IPTC [mdirector@iptc.org]

International Press Telecommunications Council 
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