[Odrl-version2] More Requirements

[Steven Rowat]

Greetings,

Renato wrote:

>1 - Offer/Agreement Model Only
>        The current model of only supporting Offers and Agreements
>        needs to be reviewed. There maybe cases where this is not
>        relevant and just a generic set of rights is only required
>        to be expressed. There is also the possibility of supporting
>        a "Request" which is from a Consumer to a Rights Holders.

Agreed that both are important changes - I think; but to clarify: in the
"generic set of rights" expression situation, do you mean that, for
instance, there may be cases where the rights holder wishes to publish the
fact that anyone may use the work in certain ways, without needing to
interact (ie. invoke an Agreement)? For example, suppose I hold the
publishing rights to recordings by a musician who has died. I may, for
various reasons, decide to donate some forms of the rights play these
recordings into the public domain. Under the v 1.1 model, someone would
need to be in 'Agreement' with this - but this is not relevant in this
case, since I only need to publish the specific 'gifts' and the permission
structure for their use. Hence the model needs to be changed to support
this. Is this an example of what you mean? If so, I agree that it's
necessary for ODRL to support this in V.2.

>possibility of supporting
>        a "Request"
This seems very important, since a major advantage of the Internet over
traditional media is that it has two-way capability. Certainly we ought to
enshrine some form of this capability at a core level of ODRL; and there
may even be more than one core form of 'Request'. For example, it may be
important to have the user be able to request  things from either the
rights holder *or* the 'work' itself. That is, one type of Request is part
of the Agreement about using a work, and one is part of the work - in the
sense that the 'Request' may be part of an *interaction* with a work which
is itself a piece of software.

That last idea leads to other possibilities that may be outside the scope
of this particular section - I'm not sure - yet still it seems important to
recognize, somewhere in ODRL, that 'Requests' or some term analogous to it
could, with increasing use of video and audio chat software, become a very
interesting part of how information-flow interactions are carried on.

For example: suppose you and I are chatting over the internet using
video-conference software, and you're a Professor of Linguistics and I'm a
'language student'. It would be wonderful, and possibly revolutionary in
the higher-education field, if ODRL could handle the situation where the
student 'requests' (by asking a question), and your answer - spoken in
realtime or chosen by you from a list of pre-packaged 'answers' - is not
only viewed by the student, but downloaded automatically onto the student's
CPU, where they can peruse it at their leisure - but only in certain ways
(set by the permissions/constraints of the interaction). And of course as
part of the ODRL interaction, there would be a small payment by the student
before the Request would be answered.   :-)

Or, as another example, someone who is offering counselling in a particular
area - say, divorce counselling - could be having an on-line discussion
with someone who is asking them questions; the questions could be Requests
which would only be answered as long as the appropriate duty (payment) is
fulfilled during the request process.

Are these possibilities covered by any part of ODRL 1.1 at present, or in
the projections for V 2? If not, perhaps they could be considered; I feel
that enabling these types of interactions for royalty or piece-pay (or
barter) interactions on the Internet could have useful and possibly
wide-ranging applications.



steven rowat


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