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This is a draft charter only. It has not been endorsed by W3C Management or Members and is therefore entirely speculative.

Comments on this draft are welcome via public-lrs-comment@w3.org [Archive, Subscribe].

License & Rights Statements Working Group Charter (Draft)

The ease of access to online content, whether it's text, video or data, often leaves the question of rights and licenses unanswered. In many cases this is unimportant: a reader does not need to know and will rarely care what license terms are associated with an online article. However, if content is to be re-used in some way – perhaps an image is being re-used in another article, a presentation is embedded in a Web page, or a dataset is being used in a novel application - then the terms and conditions of use are important. If the re-user is a commercial operation then the terms are critical. The situation becomes more complex if multiple resources are used in a single publication or application, each with its own license terms. Can they be used together? If so, what are the license terms of the new work?

Several attempts have been made to solve this problem, not least Creative Commons which, since 2001, has worked to 'keep the internet creative, free and open' by offering a set of widely understood licenses. Other well known licenses include GPL, MIT, Apache, the UK Open Government Licence and more. In May 2013, the Open Data Institute developed its vocabulary for Open Data Rights Statements. In each case, the aim is to offer clear information on what can and can't be done with the relevant resource.

The Open Digital Rights Language, ODRL, addresses a large number of use cases. Driven largely by the publishing industry, it offers “…a flexible and interoperable information model to support transparent and innovative use of digital assets in the publishing, distribution and consumption of content, applications, and services across all sectors and communities.”

The mission of the License & Rights Statements Working Group, part of the Data Activity, is to develop standards to:

  1. allow automated or semi-automated processing of license information/rights statements to determine what permissions and obligations are associated with a given resource;
  2. automatically, or semi-automatically, generate license/rights statements for new work derived from resources that are themselves covered by such restrictions.

Without wishing to limit its ability to fulfill these goals as it sees fit, the LRS WG is explicitly asked to re-use and build upon existing work as much as possible, noting that implementation and investment in Creative Commons and ODRL in particular are significant.

@@@Join the License & Rights Statements Working Group@@@.

End date 31 December 2017
Confidentiality Proceedings are public
Initial Chairs Renato Ianella, Semantic Identity
A.N. Other
Initial Team Contacts
(FTE %: 20)		 Phil Archer
Usual Meeting Schedule Teleconferences: weekly
Face-to-face: twice annually

Scope

The License & Rights Statements WG will take into account the needs of as wide a community as possible including commercial and non-commercial publishers, consumers and re-users of human readable content and machine readable data.

Out of Scope

Access control mechanisms, digital rights management. Legal information is clearly in scope, however, it is not the task of the Working Group to try and encode laws directly, nor to define a system designed to be legally rigorous.

Deliverables

The titles of the deliverables are not final; the Working Group will have to decide on the final titles as well as the structures of the documents. The Working Group may also decide to merge some deliverables into one document or produce several documents that together constitute one of the deliverables.

More detail needed? Is this the right list?

Inputs

Success Criteria

To advance the encoding specifications to Proposed Recommendation, evidence will be gathered of independent deployments of license/rights data (at least two per encoding).

For the processing model, evidence will be gathered of independent implementations where license/rights statement data has been gathered and used in a relevant application, such as a publishing tool chain, data portal etc.

Milestones (Recommendation)

Is this realistic? Can we be done by December 2017?

Milestones (Rec Track)
Note: The group will document significant changes from this initial schedule on the group home page.
Deliverable FPWD LCCR PR Rec
RDF & XML Encodings November 2016 July 2017 October 2017 December 2017
Processing Model November 2016 July 2017 October 2017 December 2017
Milestones (Notes)
Note: The group will document significant changes from this initial schedule on the group home page.
Deliverable FPWD WG Note
Use Cases & Requirements March 2016 November 2016
Data Model July 2016 January 2017

Timeline View Summary

Dependencies and Liaisons

W3C Groups

Digital Publishing Interest Group
The License & Rights Statements WG's work is equally relevant in both Digital Dublishing and the Data Activity.
Internationalization Activity
Licensing and Rights Statements must take account of multilingualism as well as jurisdictional differences.
Privacy Interest Group
Ensure that the privacy concerns are properly included in the WG's considerations.

Furthermore, the LRS Working Group expects to follow these W3C Recommendations:

Participation

To be successful, the License & Rights Statements Working Group is expected to have 20 or more active participants for its duration. To get the most out of this work, participants should expect to devote several hours a week; for budgeting purposes, we recommend at least half a day a week. For chairs and document editors the commitment will be higher, say, 1-2 days a week. Participants who follow the work less closely should be aware that if they miss decisions through inattention further discussion of those issues may be ruled out of order. However, most participants follow some areas of discussion more closely than others, and the time needed to stay in good standing therefore varies from week to week. The Working Group will also allocate the necessary resources for building Test Suites for each specification.

Communication

This group primarily conducts its work on the @@@public mailing list@@@. Administrative tasks may be conducted in @@@Member-only@@@ communications. Comments on the group's work will be welcome via the public comment list.

Information about the group (deliverables, participants, face-to-face meetings, teleconferences, etc.) is available from the LRS Working Group home page.

Decision Policy

As explained in the Process Document (section 3.3), this group will seek to make decisions when there is consensus. When the Chair puts a question and observes dissent, after due consideration of different opinions, the Chair should record a decision (possibly after a formal vote) and any objections, and move on.

A formal vote should allow for remote asynchronous participation—using, for example, email and/or web-based survey techniques. Any resolution taken in a face-to-face meeting or teleconference is to be considered provisional until 5 working days after the publication of the resolution in draft minutes sent to the group's mailing list.

This charter is written in accordance with Section 3.4, Votes of the W3C Process Document and includes no voting procedures beyond what the Process Document requires.

Patent Policy

This Working Group operates under the W3C Patent Policy (5 February 2004 Version). To promote the widest adoption of Web standards, W3C seeks to issue Recommendations that can be implemented, according to this policy, on a Royalty-Free basis.

For more information about disclosure obligations for this group, please see the W3C Patent Policy Implementation.

About this Charter

This charter for the Data on the Web Best Practices Working Group has been created according to section 6.2 of the Process Document. In the event of a conflict between this document or the provisions of any charter and the W3C Process, the W3C Process shall take precedence.

Phil Archer

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