opencontentlawyer

So no surprise I’ve been thinking more and more about semantic web technologies and the law, given my recent trips and talks on open data. This represents some of my early-stage thinking about how copyright plays into the coming framework.

For those not familiar with this area, my big picture layman’s summary of the semantic web / linked data: Make more stuff machine readable so that we can do smarter and better things with machines.

One of the strands of developing semantic web technology deals with building out copyright (and other IP) permissions into the framework. You can find out what the rights cover what, and where to go to get copyright permissions, etc, generally through adding metadata (data about data).

Going back to my lay interpretation, this means “making copyright permissions machine readable so that machines can do smarter and better stuff when dealing with copyright permissions”.

Creative Commons for example has started this through giving each of its licenses a set of machine readable code and through developing standards around these machine readable expressions of their licenses such as ccREL. Incidentally they give their licenses out in three versions: human readable (a summary), lawyer readable (the actual license) and machine readable (the extra stuff in the copy and paste code they provide).

Incidentally, at ISWC, there was a really interesting presentation on a paper (PDF) on looking at attribution, Creative Commons, and Flickr within a semantic web framework and ways to make compliant attribution in CC licenses easier.

I’m not qualified to go into deep detail on the technical side of implementing rights into the semantic web, so I’ll leave that to others. I’m thinking more about the big picture on how you build out such a framework for copyright and what approach you take.

Where do you start when trying to describe copyright licenses for the web? Continue reading →