[mdx] Policy hooks in MDX

[Josh Howlett]

I spoke to a lawyer today about the feasibility of attaching a license
to metadata aggregated and published through MDX, as opposed to the
contracts/MoUs that have been discussed previously. I think this might
have originally been Leif's idea.

The main purpose of the license would be to protect the aggregator from
any nastiness from downstream consumers, and would be solely concerned
with issues relating to exchange of metadata.

Recalling Chad's T&Cs for participating in the MDX effort, I'm not going
to dwell on the policy-stuff, apart from noting that the lawyer felt
that the general approach should be fine and that she is going to draft
a strawman license.

Anyway - a few things came up that I think are applicable within the MDX
discussions.

1. In English law, the terms of a license are only enforceable if the
licensee's attention has been drawn to the license. It might, therefore,
be desirable/necessary for an MDX *implementation* to use technical
controls to ensure that metadata consumers has been made aware of the
license.

2. It was felt that, in multi-hop aggregation, it would be desirable for
a metadata consumer to be able to establish the original registrar of
the metadata and its integrity.

3. Further to (1) and (2), it is possible that an aggregator would want
to bind all downstream consumers to the license, beyond its immediate
consumers. It might, therefore, be necessary to have tags that name the
license associated with the metadata.

josh.


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