Workshop on Technology of
Terms and Conditions
September 24-26, 1996
Workshop Proposal and Goals
Organizers: Judith L. Klavans, Center for Research on Information Access, Columbia University, and James R. Davis, Xerox PARC
1. Motivation
A major obstacle to the continued development of the national information infrastructure (NII), and specifically to the development of Digital Libraries, is the lack of adequate means of providing digital objects on any basis other than free, unrestricted access. Publishers wish to specify terms of use and ensure those terms are enforced (optionally collecting payment), before providing valuable materials on the net. While collecting payment is the subject of much research, the issues relating to rights of use seem to have been relatively neglected. The Terms and Conditions Workshop began to define the design for a common machine-readable language for expressing the terms and conditions of use of objects.
Leading members of the library, publishing, economic, legal, policy, and technical communities were invited to define basic requirements and to propose concrete pilot projects. Such projects could serve as the basis for future joint funding and research, and could provide common focus for collaborative prototyping.
Lack of means to share materials in a controlled manner continues to impede research in digital libraries. The commercial sector is quickly bringing technology to the market with no guarantee that it will interoperate or provide the required controls. Furthermore, such technologies for access control (e.g. IBM's Cryptolopes, EPR's DigiBox) and secure payment (CyberCash, ECash, etc) are not addressing the need for a language of terms and conditions. Current practices in technologies of terms and conditions do not fit the needs of all parties involved: i.e. authors, publishers, users (readers), and do not extend to international requirements. Finally, integrating points of view and requirements from different communities has proven to be difficult (Klavans 1996). A workshop on the technology of terms and conditions was timely, given the state of electronic publishing, commerce, and information interchange.
Examples of the kinds of terms and conditions that needed definition included expiration date, number of times that an item can be used, means and location of use (e.g. home use only, not for export), user class (e.g., students, or over 21), price, etc. Conditions can be stated by the creator of content or by the publisher. Conditions of use might well be included in a search (e.g. "find movies under 5"), or perhaps even subject to negotiation.
As one example of the difficulties caused by the lack of such a language, consider the Networked Computer Science Technical Report Library (NCSTRL), an ARPA-sponsored project which includes work from about fifty universities. University technical reports have a relatively low financial value, compared to, say, a scholarly journal (to say nothing of a film such as Terminator 2), and are typically written by authors eager for an audience. Yet some sites have been reluctant to contribute because of lack of means for expressing terms of use. Terms and conditions in NCSTRL are currently expressed in English as ``plain text'' statements on Web pages. Humans may read these, but they do not provide for machine interpretation, and hence they can not serve to guide automatic replication, to remove reports from circulation when required, or to collect payment. Several Digital Library Initiative sites work with materials that constitute a publisher's most valued works. Since the means to control sharing is lacking, it is difficult to demonstrate research, much less cooperate on shared research.
We need not wait for the technology to make progress, because cryptographic security is not required in all applications. In some cases, one can simply trust participants to act in accordance with agreements. The obstacle is not lack of desire to cooperate, but rather lack of means of expressing desire. In other cases, one may use watermarking to detect illicit copying after the fact, and then use the legal system to prosecute. But even for those cases where strong protection is required (as in the paid viewing of Terminator 2), the terms and conditions language is logically prior to the security and payment features. Consumers need to know what rights they are buying and what price they are paying before making the purchase.
Furthermore, even when strong protection is required, it is useful that there be a common language for expressing the actual terms, regardless of the means of enforcement, to allow for interoperation among systems. While cryptographic interoperation was not addressed in this workshop, it remains a motivating factor.
2. Goals
Our focus was on establishing a basic set of criteria, including a full list of facts, methods for representation, and technology problems for different aspects of terms and conditions. This involved:
(1) A review of current practices (including legacy systems);
(2) An overview of limitations (e.g. international requirements, privacy, fair use);
(3) A discussion of needs to be met from the different communities, such as legal, policy economic and technical;
(4) A discussion of needs of different parties, such as authors, publishers, and users;
(5) A development of requirement specifications.
Terms and conditions are best thought of as one kind of metadata, along with cataloging information, reviews and ratings, and ownership information. We hope the results of this workshop will fit into the framework begun in the 1995 Metadata Workshop at Dublin, Ohio, and continued in 1996 at Warwick, England[7].
We adopted the strategy of the Metadata workshops of limiting the scope of the workshop in the hope of making small but useful steps forward. We did not attempt to devise a language capable of expressing any possible set of terms and conditions, however detailed since this would be AI complete. Rather, we attempted to determine whether a subset exists that is small enough to be formalized, and large enough to support many useful applications. Furthermore, we ruled several topics out of scope, including:
(1) Criticism of current or proposed legal structure of intellectual property law. The language defined should be capable of accommodating current practice, or reasonably anticipated changes.
(2) Technical means of enforcement. We assumed the existence of trusted subsystems, and in any case terms of use must be expressed and understood before any use, trusted or not.
(3) Payment mechanisms. Some terms and conditions will specify payment, others will not. The language should express the requirement for payment, but not the means by which it is accomplished.
We limited the scope further, believing it more valuable to carefully define one portion of the full space than to obtain only generalities about a larger area.
3. Workshop Structure
The goal was to have a balance of talks addressing the interaction across four topical areas: policy, legal, economic, and technical. The workshop was structured for smaller discussion groups in break-out sessions covering topics defined. The purpose was to encourage further discussion and interaction over critical issues rather than discussions divided by community. Reports from the breakout groups formed part of the final report. Although the leaders provided some suggested areas for discussion, the topics for the break-out sessions were determined by the participants.
4. Dissemination of Workshop Results
Before the workshop began, we created a Web site with an overview and outline of the workshop, including an annotation system [2] allowing commentary on the documents there. This site was open to the public, allowing participation by those unable to attend in person.
During the workshop, a designated rapporteur was assigned to each session. The rapporteur was responsible for taking detailed minutes for several reports. First, there was a brief verbal report at the end of the workshop (one or two slides) on each breakout, as well as some slides summarizing the presentations themselves. This occurred during the workshop itself. On Day Two, just after the workshop, there was a technical memo produced that summarized the workshop in more detail, including abstracts of all papers and discussion.
After the workshop, we uploaded summaries to the Web site, and wrote an article for D-Lib magazine covering the workshop and its conclusions. In addition, the organizers will seek a special issue of a publication such as Communications of the ACM (CACM), with a selected group of invited articles from the workshop.
5. Pilot Project Designs for Terms and Conditions Technology
Pilot project designs can serve as the basis for joint research, and can provide common focus for collaborative prototyping. Projects could address areas such as the following:
(1) Definitions of communities of users: contractual/chartered, fair-use communities, pay-per-view/pay-for-study
(2) Trade-offs in economics
(3) Trade-offs in short vs. long-term technology planning
(4) Legal/policy "show-stoppers" in current technology planning
Desired properties of projects are technically practical and legally demonstrative, but they need not solve all aspects of information commerce. Collaborative projects, such as those with strong evaluation components and those able to facilitate international interoperation, were especially encouraged. We addressed issues such as scalability and interoperation, and we identified and recommended transmission and security architectures using open standards.
For example, a project might develop an RFC for a machine-readable notation to encode contractual information such as pricing method (subscription vs. one-time), price, units of purchase, "return" policy and permissions for resale, re-purpose, backup and download. A project might also develop a security infrastructure, implemented using on-the-fly parsing of such machine-readable contracts. These are two examples of the type of project we envisioned, but we intended to leave project design open-ended to enable participants to generate new ideas aimed at incorporating future vision into current needs.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chon, Kilnam, guest editor. 1996. Communications of the ACM. Special Section on Internet Inroads. Vol39:6:59-105.
James R. Davis and Daniel P. Huttenlocher. 1995 "Shared Annotations for Cooperative Learning" in Proceedings of Computer Supported Cooperative Learning 1995, pp.84-88.
Jacobson, Robert L. 1996. "Internet Tools Designed to Block Unauthorized Uses of
Copyrighted Works", in Chronicle of Higher Education, March 22, 1996, p. A22.
Jaszi, Peter. 1996. CNI Spring Meeting, Washington, D.C.
Klavans, Judith. 1996. "New Center at Columbia University for Digital Library Research Fostering Interdisciplinary Research and Bridging Cultural Clashes" D-Lib Magazine, March 1996.
Kahn, Robert and Wilensky, Robert. 1995. "A Framework for Distributed Digital Object Services"
Lagoze, Carl and Clifford A. Lynch and Ron Daniel, Jr. 1996. "The Warwick Framework: a container architecture for aggregating sets of metadata" Cornell CS technical report, to appear June 1996
Pyle, Raymond, guest editor. 1996. Communications of the ACM. Special Section on Electronic Commerce. Vol. 39, no. 6 pp. 22-58.
Röscheisen, Martin. 1996. Beyond Privacy as Anonymity: Framework and Requirements for an Electronic Privacy Rights Management Infrastructure. Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference, CFP96, Boston, March 28-30, 1996.
Martin Röscheisen and Terry Winograd. 1996. A Communication Agreement Framework for Access/Action Control. Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Research in Security and Privacy, Oakland, California.
Weber, Robert. 1996. Is Rights Management the Right Opportunity for Higher Education?, CNI Spring Meeting, Washington, D.C.