From legal code to digital code: making software services rights-aware

Abstract

Services proliferate in myriad domains, with their seamless potentiality raising new issues such as the need to articulate the rights and obligations associated with the services. Licensing is a method for exploiting intellectual property rights in software. Licences enable developers to control how consumers use software content. Consequently, developers rely on the contracts in the form of licence agreements to protect software from unauthorised use. Conceptualising service licences and making them in machine-interpretable form would promote broader usage of services. In this paper, we will explore the concept of service licensing and how to transform service licences from human-readable form (legal code) to machine-readable form (digital code).