http://thinkipstrategy.com/ipthinktank.podcast/978/The-rise-of-Apples-closed-platform-IP-Think-Tank-podcast-23-Apr-2010

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?

I see (and have seen presented by others) three options:

• Option 1. Start with copyright law and write out permissions based on each of the individual rights bundled up with copyright.
• Option 2. Start with what users may do with a work and then whether you grant them permission.
• Option 3. Start with current copyright licensing practice and how copyright gets bundled and used by licensors currently.

I see options 2 or 3 as the only real way to go. Starting with copyright law (Option 1), and expressing the rights – such as simply “distribution” – paints with entirely too broad a brush. To express a permission in terms of “distribution” misses the fine grained control that copyright gives rightsholders.

For example, industry practice (say in the movie industry) often break down the broad distribution right into very fine grained levels, such as:

• by geographic region – North America market versus European market
• by media type – theatrical vs satellite rights vs DVD rights
• by time – licenses last for set number of years

Option 1 – starting with copyright law – also has a further wrinkle: What copyright law do you use? Copyright consists of national rights harmonised by international treaties. The Berne Convention (or rather, Berne via TRIPs) sets a floor and not a ceiling, and member states have fairly wide variation in how the implement and enforce it. Using Berne as a “copyright law for the global internet” may be tempting but is inaccurate – 171 countries on the internet mean 171 different sets of copyright law. One specific right such as “distribution” means in one place may mean something different somewhere else, and you have to find ways to express both of those differences (though that is not to say that this can’t be done or that semantic web technologies aren’t addressing the problem of different definitions).

Options 2 and 3 admittedly aren’t too far apart from each other. Mainly I see this as a difference in tone rather than a deep divide:

• Option 2 starts with the hypothetical user and asks what could he or she possibly do with the work, versus
• Option 3 starts with industry practice in licensing and asks how do licensors typically license their works.

I think Option 3 is probably the more practical of the two, as while copyright law may allow super fine grained control at times, the key is what level of control most rightsholders usually exercise and how they bundle those rights. Mechanical rights, for example, are the name given by the industry to the right to reproduce and distribute a music CD, but aren’t a single right granted by statute.

Either way, more fine grained expressions of copyright will get built into the next generation of web technologies – indeed this has already started with ccREL and others. Starting with existing copyright practice and building out from there seems to make the most sense to me.

YMMV

The system works by scanning the iris as the eye is put to the viewfinder when the shot is composed.

So this is a combo of digital watermarking technologies and iris recognition hardware and software that produces images that can be linked back to the photographer. Digital watermarks are invisible information hidden within a digital file that can be used to identify information about the digital file. You can use them in online copyright enforcement to track the origin and subsequent usage of content. The iris scanning watermark idea raises some interesting privacy and data protection issues, but those comments are for another blog. In terms of online copyright enforcement, it looks like the main advantage is an easy way to watermark images as they are created so that they can later be tracked.

Watermarks can fall into what is often called “digital rights management” in that it can be used to associate the rights granted with that digital file. A much narrower area of DRM are TPMs — technological protection measures that try to actually restrict what can and can’t be done with a work through the use of “digital locks”. Watermarks are much less invasive in that they can only associate information with a digital file, and don’t involve — on their own — locking what can be done with the file.

Creative Commons licences don’t allow for the use of technical means of restricting the rights granted to users of the work. In section 4a of the unported Attribution license (CC BY 3.0 unported), for example, it states:

You may not impose any effective technological measures on the Work that restrict the ability of a recipient of the Work from You to exercise the rights granted to that recipient under the terms of the License.

However, as I’ve argued elsewhere in an article titled “Can TPMs Create a Commons? Looking at Whether and How TPMs and Creative Commons Licences can Work Together.” [SSRN] [Indicare article], watermarking technologies could fit with use of CC licences:

Watermarking … is the least invasive method and thus most likely to comport both philosophically and legally with the Creative Commons family of licenses. Simply placing some information in the work would not hamper the ability to copy and distribute the work. They would perhaps be most useful for those using the “No Derivative” CC license. Watermarking could allow for users to authenticate the integrity of the content and for content creators to track use. The use information can then be passed on to funding agencies or used internally in order to assess the usefulness of the licenses in encouraging re-use. These watermarks could also help prevent commercial use for organizations using the non-commercial (NC) option.

So from a CC/Flickr perspective, you could take a photo with one of these Canon iris cameras, upload your photos to Flickr and select a CC licence, such as the non-commercial no-derivatives version (CC-BY-NC-ND), and you would have an additional tool to try to enforce your rights if they were used without your permission by a commercial image company.

Attributor, a Silicon Valley startup, helps content owners track their intellectual property to find examples of infringement. But until now, no one has really thought about a better way to license content on the Internet, so that both large and tiny publishers have an incentive to avoid simply stealing stuff.

That’s where GumGum comes in. Images today are generally licensed for a flat fee, exclusively or non-exclusively. GumGum founders Ophir Tanz and Ari Mir think a better way is to charge for impressions, or on an advertising-supported basis. But tracking image impressions isn’t trivial, so they first had to build a platform to do that.

Images are available either ad-supported or on a cost per impression basis, and are in flash to serve the ads or track the impressions (as appropriate). Interesting way of monetizing content on the web.