ODRL, Open Digital Rights Language popped up twice this week for me and I don’t think I’ve been aware of it before. Some notes for me to start exploring.

Rights Expression Languages

Rights Expression Languages, RELs, provide a machine readable way to convey or transfer usage conditions, rights, restraints, granularly w.r.t. both actions and actors. This can then be added as metadata to something. ODRL is a rights expression language, and seems to be a de facto standard.

ODRL is a W3C recommendation since 2018, and thus part of the open web standards. ODRL has its roots in the ’00s and Digital Rights Management (DRM): the abhorred protections media companies added to music and movies, and now e-books, in ways that restrains what people can do with media they bought to well below the level of what was possible before and commonly thought part of having bought something.

ODRL can be expressed in JSON or RDF and XML. A basic example from Wikipedia looks like this:


{
"@context": "http://www.w3.org/ns/odrl.jsonld",
"uid": "http://example.com/policy:001",
"permission": [{
"target": "http://example.com/mysong.mp3",
"assignee": "John Doe",
"action": "play"
}]
}

In this JSON example a policy describes that example.com grants John permission to play mysong.

ODRL in the EU Data Space

In the shaping of the EU common market for data, aka the European common data space, it is important to be able to trace provenance and usage conditions for not just data sets, but singular pieces of data, as it flows through use cases, through applications and their output back into the data space.
This week I participated in a webinar by the EU Data Space Support Center (DSSC) about their first blueprint of data space building blocks, and for federation of such data spaces.

They propose ODRL as the standard to describe usage conditions throughout data spaces.

The question of enactment

It wasn’t the first time I talked about ODRL this week. I had a conversation with Pieter Colpaert. I reached out to get some input on his current view of the landscape of civic organisations active around the EU data spaces. We also touched upon his current work at the University of Gent. His research interest is on ODRL currently, specifically on enactment. ODRL is a REL, a rights expression language. Describing rights is one thing, enacting them in practice, in technology, processes etc. is a different thing. Next to that, how do you demonstrate that you adhere to the conditions expressed and that you qualify for using the things described?

For the EU data space(s) this part sounds key to me, as none of the data involved is merely part of a single clear interaction like in the song example above. It’s part of a variety of flows in which actors likely don’t directly interact, where many different data elements come together. This includes flows through applications that tap into a data space for inputs and outputs but are otherwise outside of it. Such applications are also digital twins, federated systems of digital twins even, meaning a confluence of many different data and conditions across multiple domains (and thus data spaces). All this removes a piece of data lightyears from the neat situation where two actors share it between them in a clearly described transaction within a single-faceted use case.

Expressing the commons

It’s one thing to express restrictions or usage conditions. The DSSC in their webinar talked a lot about business models around use cases, and ODRL as a means for a data source to stay in control throughout a piece of data’s life cycle. Luckily they stopped using the phrase ‘data ownership’ as they realised it’s not meaningful (and confusing on top of it), and focused on control and maintaining having a say by an actor.
An open question for me is how you would express openness and the commons in ODRL. A shallow search surfaces some examples of trying to express Creative Commons or other licenses this way, but none recent.

Openness, can mean an absence of certain conditions, although there may be some (like adding the same absence of conditions to re-shared material or derivative works), which is not the same as setting explicit permissions. If I e.g. dedicate something to the public domain, an image for instance, then there are no permissions for me to grant, as I’ve removed myself from that role of being able to give permission. Yet, you still want to express it to ensure that it is clear for all that that is what happened, and especially that it remains that way.

Part of that question is about the overlap and distinction between rights expressed in ODRL and authorship rights. You can obviously have many conditions outside of copyright, and can have copyright elements that may be outside of what can be expressed in RELs. I wonder how for instance moral authorship rights (that an author in some (all) European jurisdictions cannot do away with) can be expressed after an author has transferred/sold the copyrights to something? Or maybe, expressing authorship rights / copyrights is not what RELs are primarily for, as it those are generic and RELs may be meant for expressing conditions around a specific asset in a specific transaction. There have been various attempts to map all kinds of licenses to RELs though, so I need to explore more.

This is relevant for the EU common data spaces as my government clients will be actors in them and bringing in both open data and closed and unsharable but re-usable data, and several different shades in between. A range of new obligations and possibilities w.r.t. data use for government are created in the EU data strategy laws and the data space is where those become actualised. Meaning it should be possible to express the corresponding usage conditions in ODRL.

ODRL gaps?

Are there gaps in the ODRL standard w.r.t. what it can cover? Or things that are hard to express in it?
I came across one paper ‘A critical reflection on ODRL’ (PDF Kebede, Sileno, Van Engers 2020), that I have yet to read, that describes some of those potential weaknesses, based on use cases in healthcare and logistics. Looking forward to digging out their specific critique.