Creative Commons License Scenarios in AIR

Introduction
Creative Commons RDF Schema
Extending the Creative Commons RDF Schema
A Simple Example

Introduction

This document describes how some of the Creative Commons Licenses could be encoded in the AIR Policy Language. This is just the preliminary work in creating a framework for enforcing these license terms on the web.

You might find reading the following documents helpful:

Creative Commons RDF Schema

The RDF Schema as defined by Creative Commons could be found from creativecommons.org in a description format, as well as in RDF/XML format.

This schema describes several :

Classes such as Work, License, Jurisdiction, Permission, Requirement, Prohibition
Permission types such as Reproduction, Disribution, Derivative Works, High Income Nation Use, Sharing
Requirements for the Work such as Notice, Attribution, Share Alike, Source Code, and
Prohibition types such as Commercial Use, etc.

The schema also defines several properties for :

License such as licnese, permits, requires, prohits
Work such as morePermissions, attributionName, attributionURL, jurisdiction, legalcode, deprecatedOn etc.

For ease of use (and readability) the same schema is described in RDF/Notation3 (n3). The Graphical Representation for this schema would be as follows:
graphical representation of the CC schema

graphical representation of the CC schema

Figure 1: Creative Commons Schema

Extending the Creative Commons RDF Schema

The above schema is not descriptive enough for AIR policies to be written in. Therefore some classes and properties were added and/or extended from the original schema. The extended schema in RDF/N3 can be found here.

The terms License and Work refer to the same concepts as in the original Creative Commons schema. However, in order to have several different types of Licenses which inherit from the class License, several atributes such as attribution, share-alike, non-commercial, and no-derivatives were added. For e.g., the BY-License is a subclass of License with the attribute attribution. Several other classes such as Use was defined in order to characterize for what purpose the Creative Work is used for.

graphical representation of the CC extended schema

Figure 2: Extended Creative Commons Schema

A Simple Example

Imagine there is someone called "Creative Photographer". He takes some very nice photos and uploads them to his Flickr account. He attaches the Creative Commons "BY" License to his photo page, indicating that he would not mind anybody copying, distributing, displaying, or remixing the copyrighted work, as long as they give him credit by linking to his FOAF file or his homepage. This particular policy could be written in AIR as in this document: BY_Policy.n3.

Along comes "Good Photo User" and "Bad Photo User". Both of them are interested in publishing a particular photo - the "Creative Photo" in their blogs.

The Good Photo User seeing the CC license on the Creative Photographer's Flickr page, gives the proper attribution by linking to his FOAF file. The transaction event log of the Good Photo user can be see in this file. When this log is reasoned with the "BY" policy as described above, it would give an output like the following:

If you are using Firefox and have the latest version of the Tabulator extension installed you could see this output by following this link.

Figure 3: Good Photo User Scenario

The Bad Photo User is very careless and he fails to give the proper attribution to the Creative Photographer in his blog where he has linked and embedded the Creative Photo. The event log pertaining to his activities is as in this document. When this log is reasoned with the "BY" policy as described above, it would give an output like the following:

You could try out this scenario by clicking on this link.

Figure 4: Bad Photo User Scenario