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

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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