Re: Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) submission to W3C

David, I'm obviously way behind on my email, but I thank you for the piece 
on rights, which I will look over more carefully in the next few days.

I am concerned about the enumeration of rights as well, but perhaps from 
another point of view. As someone involved in academic/non-profit 
information I find the requirement to list of positive rights to be a 
barrier. How would I, in most rights languages today, state that I wish the 
work to be in the public domain? Must I list EVERYTHING that one is allowed 
to do with the work? Similarly if I want my file to have to standard GNU 
licensing terms - I would have a long list of "do's" to express what is a 
fairly simple license.

Copyright law tells you what you cannot do, and leaves the rest to your 
imagination. This prevents certain behaviors but allows for some level of 
freedom and innovation. Reversing this to be: "if it isn't listed here you 
can't do it" is going to run afoul of technological change very quickly.

If nothing else I want DRM systems to have a switch where I can say: this 
license lists permissions/this license lists prohibitions.

kc

At 02:54 PM 9/20/2002 +0100, David Parrott wrote:
>The commentary at http://www.w3.org/Submission/2002/06/Comment discusses
>the limitation of "rights" languages with respect to expressing all
>possible exceptions.  I have been interested in this subject for some
>time, prompted initially by talking to representatives of various
>societies for blind people in the context of eBook consumption.
>
>It struck me that expressing low-level definitions of permitted actions
>is where things start to go wrong.  If I say that an eBook can only be
>consumed using a certain font, on a certain device, etc, etc, then the
>exception of allowing a text-to-speech conversion is ruled out.
>However, a publisher could not possibly think of all the exceptions.  It
>is simply not scalable.
>
>Would it not be better to allow some form of trusted interpretation of a
>higher-level set of rules?  Before people start shouting about
>complexity, I don't say this is an easy task, and it certainly requires
>a well thought-out trust framework.
>
>Using trusted interpretation that takes account of trusted context, one
>might even be able to tackle some of the "70 years after death" issues
>(a certificate from a trusted agency attesting to date of death might
>form part of the context of interpretation).  Interpretation is not
>restricted to changing existing rules; it might introduce some new ones,
>based on well-defined meta rules.
>
>I attach a paper (Zip archive containing HTML + 5 images) that I don't
>think I've shared with this list before (I might have, if so,
>apologies), although it has been shared with MPEG and OeBF so some
>readers may have seen it.  It explores some ideas around the above
>theme.  Please view the ideas as examples, and not an attempt at a
>definitive answer.  I'd be interested in responses.
>  <<When is a Right not a Right.zip>>
>Best regards,
>/Dave Parrott
>_ ______________________________________________________________
>Dr David J. Parrott (Chartered Engineer) Business Technology Group
>       Reuters Limited, 85 Fleet Street, London EC4P 4AJ, UK.
>     Direct Line: +44 (0)20 7542 9830, Fax: +44 (0)20 7542 8314
>         Email: David.Parrott@reuters.com, dparrott@acm.org
>
>
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*********************************************
Karen Coyle           kcoyle@kcoyle.net

            http://www.kcoyle.net
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Received on Saturday, 5 October 2002 13:09:00 UTC