Subject: [hrpc] Draft: Rights for restricted content

From: Niels ten Oever <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2018 13:42:02 +0200

Might be interesting to invite the author of this draft to hrpc?

https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-donnerhacke-linktax-01

Best,

Niels
-- 
Niels ten Oever
Researcher and PhD Candidate
Datactive Research Group
University of Amsterdam

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2018 14:05:53 -0400

Hi,

Has the review team taken this draft up? If so, then perhaps a
discussion in that slot would be a good start.

avri

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From: Niels ten Oever <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Jul 2018 12:47:34 +0200

Hi Avri,

Review Team is working on SUIT and QUIC now, but I thought because this
draft explicitly discusses rights it might be relevant, interesting, and
within purview of HRPC, but I'll leave that to you as chair to decide.

Best,

Niels

On 07/09/2018 08:05 PM, [email-masked] wrote:
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From: Amelia Andersdotter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 12 Jul 2018 22:05:53 +0200

Hi all,

I think it's relevant to discuss this draft as well, and would like to
see a presentation of it.

best regards

Amelia

-- 
Amelia Andersdotter
Technical Consultant, Digital Programme

ARTICLE19
www.article19.org

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From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2018 08:12:00 -0400

On Thu, Jul 12, 2018 at 10:05:53PM +0200,
 Amelia Andersdotter <[email-masked]> wrote 

> see a presentation of it.

I tried to get in touch with the author but I failed, he doesn't seem
to be in Montreal. Frankly, this draft seems more adapted to a 1st
april RFC. I suppose the author just wanted to make a point through
irony but I did not find it amusing.

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From: Amelia Andersdotter <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2018 15:54:12 +0200

> irony but I did not find it amusing.

Is this an assessment of the technical feasibility of the draft, or are
you objecting to the underlying problem formulation that the draft is
trying to solve through technical means?

The underlying problem formulation, afaik, is there since at least the
early 1990s and was detailed by Lawrence Lessig even in the first
version of Code (very famous book on cyberlaw). The idea then, wrote
Lessig, was that fair use obligations and similar restrictions on
licensing really were only the law because it was impractical to impose
licenses for a lot of different uses. But licenses would be more
manageable, went the reasoning, if there were computer systems to keep
track of them. So that's attached to a whole bunch of issues that are
outside the scope of HRPC, but it might loop into one of the ongoing WG
drafts (Niels' political draft in particular, and whether publication
and consideration in IETF is in and of itself political (for instance),
or alternatively - which is more interesting for HRPC - whether
publication and a subsequent failure to considerate a draft is
political(!)). Not considering issues is as much as a political
statement as considering them, paraphrasing Desmond Tutu.

best,

ARTICLE19
www.article19.org

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From: Andrew Sullivan <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2018 10:04:02 -0400

On Thu, Jul 19, 2018 at 03:54:12PM +0200, Amelia Andersdotter wrote:
> Is this an assessment of the technical feasibility of the draft

The clue that the technical feasibility approaches zero is contained
in the first sentence of section 3.2: "In order to track the route of
carriers involved…."

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
[email-masked]

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From: Stephane Bortzmeyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2018 10:33:25 -0400

On Thu, Jul 19, 2018 at 03:54:12PM +0200,
 Amelia Andersdotter <[email-masked]> wrote 
 a message of 44 lines which said:

> Is this an assessment of the technical feasibility of the draft, or
> are you objecting to the underlying problem formulation that the
> draft is trying to solve through technical means?

The biggest problems are of course political (sending money to the
transit providers, and trying to define rights in the links) but there
are indeed big technical issues:

* #1 is that experience in hypertext has clearly shown that adding
metadata in the link is brittle because, when the target changes,
there is no way to list all links pointing to it, and therefore to
modify them (if I remember correctly, this was one of the reasons Tim
Berners-Lee's original article about the Web was rejected, since the
craze at this time was bidirectional links). This is specially
critical here since "rights on content" are quite changeable. So,
"rights" and/or permissions must stay on the origin site, not be put
in the links (except for stupid ideas like "link tax").

* the draft is specific to HTML links instead of using the more
general link framework of RFC 8288.

* TCP options cannot be relied on
<https://www.imperialviolet.org/binary/ecntest.pdf>, unfortunately.

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From: Tony Rutkowski <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2018 12:30:29 -0400

Hi Amelia,

The need you are addressing was the focus in the 1990s of Bob Kahn (yes,
that Bob Kahn) and his wife Patrice Lyons who developed the overlay
object tagging system known as Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for
fine-grained identification of associated IPR and availability
constraints.  Patrice is a IPR lawyer who spent some time at UNESCO
early in her career.  See https://www.doi.org/  DOIs have after 20
years, seemingly begun to proliferate.

They basically adapted the earlier, widely used, ITU-T/ISO OID standards
which can potentially meet the same needs, only DOI's are optimised for
IPR and was extensively funded by multiple IPR communities.

--tony

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2018 14:23:58 -0400

For some old historical context Ted Nelson's Xanadu proposed and to
some extent implemented two-way links with payment or at least
statistics in mind.

"Who points to me" is a generally difficult problem without either
brute force (google, web spiders in general) or some sort of
architected method (Xanadu) and even in those cases can be difficult
particularly if one wants some high degree of accuracy for payments
for example.

I believe the basic idea in Xanadu was to use a transfinite* link
scheme (think: Dewey decimal system, a.b.c, a.x.b.c, etc) where links
incorporated metadata. The person who probably understands this best
is Roger Gregory, a mathematician who worked with Nelson on the idea
and I still hear from.

   http://xanadu.com/tech/

* The term "transfinite" is also used in reference to classifications
of infinities in mathematics, no relationship, or only a passing one.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

Software Tool & Die    | [email-masked]             | http://www.TheWorld.com
Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: +1 617-STD-WRLD       | 800-THE-WRLD
The World: Since 1989  | A Public Information Utility | *oo*

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From: Tony Rutkowski <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2018 14:38:30 -0400

FYI. I  bumped into Ted at the Oxford Internet Institute about a decade
ago, so there may be some residual links.

Ted deserves credit for being the real inventor of the Web idea, as well as
the SGML folks in ITU-T & ISO.  The CERN folks "borrowed."