Minutes, March 23, 2021

Agenda

Open discussion about the first potential technical solution, titled “Proposal based on http headers“.

Participants

Giulia, Giuseppe, Claudio, Jean-Baptiste, Steve, Leonard, Aziz, Brendan

Log of the discussion

Leonard: many people with a CMS don’t control their own servers. Sharepoint and other CMS are not so easy to control … Our solution should be usable for anybody putting content on the web.  Therefore http headers should not be the only solution. But we must be careful and also avoid too many solutions. 

Jean-Baptiste: The proposed solution would be the easiest for my company. e-distributors / aggregators control their servers. I agree that a different solution could be added for specific use cases. 

Claudio: if people cannot control their servers, they should go to a proper e-distributor, who will e.g. develop a CMS plug-in. 

Claudio : if you want to defend your content, the burden is on you. 

Steve: what is the legal minimum of functionalities required for our solution?

Laurent: a simple flag expressing an opt-out from the exception, as defined by the Article 4. Everything else is “cherry on the cake”.

Leonard: in the proposed solution, the license is referenced via a URL. We’ll have to be careful about potential same origin issues (CORS  issues). And decide if URLs can be relative or must be absolute. 

Leonard: the proposal assumes that the license will be either a human readable or machine readable license. It there a use case where both will be provided by a rightsholder?

Laurent: offering both human and machine readable licenses implies a risk of discrepancy between both expressions.

Giulia: I think the need is exclusive and human readable is useful for less tech advanced rightsholders, a sort of fallback. 

Claudio: I imagine the reverse; machine readable should be mandatory, human readable is a plus.  

Jean-Baptiste: many French publishers will decide on a human readable license. 

Leonard: As a TDM Actor, if I mis-interpret a human readable license, I am legally liable; therefore we should impose machine readable licenses. 

Steve: we could define a limited set of templated licenses to ease the use of machine-readable licenses. 

Leonard: maybe we miss a value TDM-a = “0.5”. Something between “TDM rights are reserved” and “”TDM rights are not reserved”.

Laurent: isn’t it what TDM-a = “2” is for? a notion of “TDM rights may be reserved or not, depending the license you acquire”?

Steve: outside of the EU, I want to reserve TDM rights for commercial companies. If TDM Actors pay a fee they get specific TDM rights.  How will people be able to express such a thing?

Giulia: when we study the license format, we’ll have to find a format which allows conditional information (if the use is commercial; at this location; before this date). 

Conclusion

For the next call, the co-chairs will prepare a “Proposal based on a file hosted on the origin website” and if possible a “Proposal based on meta properties in html documents”.

We will use the same anti-bikeshedding TDM-a and TDM-b properties.