[mdx] Policy hooks in MDX

[Leif Johansson]

On Wednesday 13 May 2009 05:33:56 pm Josh Howlett wrote:
> 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.

I think I was the first to harp on about this extensively although I suspect
the idea occured to other people before me.

>
> 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.

Precisely.

>
> 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.

Woot!

>
> 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.

I thougth about this too and it seems like a simple click-through requirement
on the website before you're allowed to obtain a feed would be fairly easy.

>
> 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.

Provinence - I guess we already decided this was a good idea and should
be done using the attribute extension.

>
> 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.
>

Yea and probably we'd include it in a comment just to be on the safe side.

Tremendous work Josh!

	Cheers Leif

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