Raj Singh wrote: > This is a crucial point, and where the rubber really meets the road. How > do we enforce digital rights in an open, interoperable software > environment? Well, we don't have the answer to that yet, but that's our > goal. > And as an industry consortium comprising every type of organization from > commercial, open source, academic, govt. etc, nothing less will do. > > Any ideas on how to make rights work within a heterogeneous software > environment is welcome. > --- > Raj
I believe the first step is to separate out enforcement from description. And to tackle the easier, less controversial, and more universally desired problem first. We all benefit from rights description technology; it isn't so clear who benefits from enforcement technology. The term 'DRM' raises tensions in opensource/opencontent tech circles, as it is suggestive of heavyweight (and often ill-fated) mechanisms for enforcement. When I was at W3C there was a move towards adopting "Digital Rights *Description*" as a name for a smaller, more feasible and declarative piece of the puzzle. I'm not sure where the terminology originates, though it's often seen in Creative Commons contexts. Let's have better digital rights description for geodata, alongside an analysis of the licensing concepts (Creative Commons in particular) that are used for such data. Sometimes there will be enough in common with other forms of data that a geo-specific license might not be needed. But that even on it's own is a big complex area, especially in an international context. For example, ... imagine an aggregator mixing geodata with event listings, or music-related data (http://musicbrainz.org/papers/mb_license.html), or scientific data (http://sciencecommons.org/resources/faq/databases.html). Understanding what terminological concepts can be shared across all such data is critical to the ability to mix, merge, re-use and re-distribute, but machine-readable license terms for all this are at such an early stage. And I suspect, risk being needlessly fragmented if "science", "geodata", "events" and "music" data licensing initiatives proceed without enough consideration of overlap and shared (legal/technical) terminology. The rights *description* piece of work is much smaller, much much more achieveable, than the rights enforcement piece. Yet even that is a huge piece of work. Let's start with the "easy" stuff... cheers, Dan _______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://lists.burri.to/mailman/listinfo/geowanking
