Identity as Linked Data on Immutable Ledgers

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Update

We just released a first draft of the COALA Intellectual Property Specification. Additionally, we released a document outlining the models' schema definitions. Feedback, comments and questions are welcome!

Motivation

Content creators on the Web are getting a raw deal. They get a fraction of a cent for an ad played on YouTube, and nothing on Facebook, for filling these sites with traffic-driving content. It’s hard to make a living when you’re a creative. Licensing is hard; the user experience is bad, so lawyers and middlemen extract the most value. In the music industry, more money flows into the pockets of distributors than creatives. Consumers are often happy to pay for their content. Instead, they're forced to sit through ads.

The COALA IP Working Group

To address these problems, COALA IP (Coalition Of Automated Legal Applications, Intellectual Property) was formed to design and implement a free and open specification for handling digital licensing of intellectual property. Its goals are to establish open, free, and easy ways to claim attribution, add metadata, license works, mediate IP disputes, and authenticate claims of others. Furthermore, the group believes that there should be global agreement at the data level without the need for centralized control.

A recent, more concrete, endeavor of the group has been to write a specification for handling digital licensing of intellectual property on immutable ledgers. It's an effort to transform the implementation-agnostic Rights Reference Model of the Linked Content Coalition into a free and open guideline. It outlines technologies that could be leveraged for implementation and structure of a specification for all involved parties: creators, rights holders, consumers, developers, etc. The protocol is to be technology-opinionated, but ledger-agnostic.

The COALA IP Protocol

The COALA IP protocol is essentially two parallel technical efforts:

  1. It's a community-driven effort to find and define a minimally-viable set of data for licensing intellectual property (using RDF schema definitions)
  2. It's a free and open messaging/communication protocol for license-transactions

At its core, the RDF schema defines ontology over seven main entities and their interconnections. The ontology as well as all entities have been derived from the LCC's RRM:

Since finding a minimally-viable set of properties that describe each of the entities' features is difficult without having domain-specific industry knowledge, COALA IP's plan is to open this process up to the community, thereby letting the community define and derive domain-specific RDF schema. As soon as saturation for changes in schema emerge, further formalization is planned to take them to an appropriate international standards organization.

Key technologies used to achieve this endeavor are:

As of the writing of this position paper, all pieces of the specification are in place except one: Identity (the so called "Party" entity mentioned in the previous section).

Members of the COALA IP working group would like to actively participate in design-workshops of the Web of Trust working group to discuss identity solutions that fulfill the following systematic requirements:

In order to be compliant with the current state of the COALA IP protocol, the following requirements should be fulfilled:

Additionally, some philosophical requirements the COALA IP group would like to address:

Attribution

This paper couldn't not have been written without the tremendous efforts from collaborators and employees of the following projects: