Formal Foundations for Digital Rights Description and Management

The Creative Commons (CC) licenses are widely used for content such as documents, movies, and songs on blogs and movie-sharing sites. We have formalized the legal codes of the CC licenses by using a many-sorted first-order predicate logic [1]. Toward the automated processing of the CC licenses, we have also provided an algorithm to verify that specific operations, such as content modification and redistribution, are allowed under a CC license. Building on the formalization of the CC licenses, we have also considered formal aspects of interoperability between various licenses for content protection [2, 3, 5].

This logic-based approach has been further exploited to devise a formal language for access control policies [4]. We have illustrated the effectiveness of our proposed language by giving examples from the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) Project.

Relevant References

[1] Kunihiko Fujita and Yasuyuki Tsukada, A formal foundation for Creative Commons legal codes (in Japanese), IPSJ Journal, Vol. 49, No. 9 (September 2008) 3165-3179. [Abstract]

[2] Kunihiko Fujita, Hiroki Endo, and Yasuyuki Tsukada, A formal approach to interoperability between licenses for content protection, in: Short Papers Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Security (IWSEC 2009) (ISBN 978-4-915256-76-9, Information Processing Society of Japan, October 2009) pp. 81-98. [Abstract]

[3] Kunihiko Fujita and Yasuyuki Tsukada, An analysis of interoperability between licenses, in: Hongxia Jin and Marc Joye, editors, Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management (ACM-DRM 2010) (ACM, October 2010) pp. 61-72. [Abstract]

[4] Kunihiko Fujita and Yasuyuki Tsukada, A notation for policies using feature structures, in: Joaquin Garcia-Alfaro and Guillermo Navarro-Arribas, editors, Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Data Privacy Management (DPM 2010), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 6514 (Springer, February 2011) pp. 140-154. [Abstract]

[5] Kunihiko Fujita and Yasuyuki Tsukada, An approach to the formal analysis of license interoperability, Computers and Electrical Engineering, Vol. 38, No. 6 (November 2012) 1670-1686. [Abstract]