Approximating Fair Use in LicenseScript

Current rights management systems are not able to enforce copyright laws because of both legal and technological reasons. The contract rights granted by a copyright owner are often overridden by the users’ statutory rights that are granted by the laws. In particular, Fair Use allows for “unauthorized but not illegal” use of content. Two technological reasons why fair use cannot be upheld: (1) the current XML-based rights expression language (REL) cannot capture user’s statutory rights; and (2) the underlying architectures cannot support copyright enforcement. This paper focuses on the first problem and we propose a way of solving it by a two-pronged approach: (1) rights assertion, to allow a user assert new rights to the license, i.e. freely express her rights under fair use; and (2) audit logging, to record the asserted rights and keep track of the copies rendered and distributed under fair use. We apply this approach in LicenseScript (a logic-based REL) to demonstrate how LicenseScript can approximate fair use.