Towards A Formalism for Terms and Conditions
Workshop Homepage
September 24 - 26, 1996
A major obstacle to the further development of digital libraries, and
the national information infrastructure as a whole, is the lack of
adequate means of providing digital objects and information on any
basis other than free, unrestricted access. Authors are increasingly
taking the path of self-publishing using assorted home-grown schemes
to seek payment and to impose terms and conditions on use. Publishers
wish to specify terms of use and ensure those terms are enforced
(optionally collecting payment), before providing valuable materials
on the net. While payment and related topics are the subject of much
commercial activity, mechanisms for the specification of terms of
use seem to have been largely neglected.
We propose to hold a workshop on developing a formalism for terms and
conditions for the use of digital objects and information. This
formalism, or language, must be agreed upon by members of several
communities involved in the issues raised by terms and conditions. We
will limit the scope of the workshop in the
hope of making small but concrete and useful steps forward; this
strategy has been pursued successfully in recent related workshops on
parallel issues of metadata, i.e. data describing the content,
characteristics, quality, and other features of stored data. We will
not attempt to devise a formalism capable of expressing any possible
set of terms and conditions, however detailed - this would most likely
be beyond the scope of what may currently be possible. Rather, we
will determine a subset that is small enough
to be formalized, and large enough to support many useful
applications.
We will focus on developing a formalism which:
- is capable of
accommodating current practice, or reasonably anticipated changes;
- assumes the existence of
secure trusted subsystems, and in any case terms of use must be expressed and
understood before any use, trusted or not;
- is able to express the
requirement for payment, but not necessarily the means by which it is accomplished.
We consider several topics as out of scope for this workshop,
including criticism of current or proposed legal structure of intellectual
property law, technical means of enforcement, and
payment mechanisms since
some terms and conditions will specify
payment but others will not.
We will invite leading members of the library, publishing, economic,
legal, policy, and technical communities to define basic requirements
and to propose concrete pilot projects. Such projects can serve as
the basis of joint funding and research, and can provide common focus
for collaborative prototyping.
The Workshop organizers are
James R. Davis
(Xerox) and
Judith L. Klavans (Columbia University,
Center for Research on Information Access
and
Department of Computer Science).
The workshop is scheduled for September 24 - 26, 1996
at the Columbia University Conference Center at Arden Homestead, north of
New York City.
Information for attendees
The Arden Homestead
Related Links
Rights Manager
Text for Fair Use Booklet
Terms and Conditions Publication
Problems with this page? Send email to
davis@dri.cornell.edu
or klavans@cs.columbia.edu
This page is located at http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~klavans/Cria/Current-projects/TermsConditions/workshop.html
This page was last updated on 9/27/96