Legal Publishing is one of the markets that we covered in our Creative Destruction 7 Act Play series. Here are Part 1 and Part 2.

Earlier this week, we did an update on Law.gov. Today we take a look at something that is already established in the market – Creative Commons. It is simple and getting a lot of momentum and it points the way to a legal semantic web one clause at a time.

What Is Creative Commons?

You see the Creative Commons logo on a site. That tells you that you can:

In the past we had two options as consumers of copyrighted creative material. We could do the right thing and only proceed when we had the agreement of the owner. This might be as easy as an email exchange or a payment or as messy as teams of lawyers drafting contracts. Or we could just take what we wanted, otherwise known as piracy.

That does not sound very semantic. This is where CC-Rel comes in:

“Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (CC REL) is a specification describing how license information may be described using RDF and how license information may be attached to works.”

The first example of this in the wild is Thingverse. Now that is a cool first use case!

The use of metadata means that crawlers or any other automated consumer of content can understand the same rules.

What About Other Use Cases?

Licensing content is something that has been complex. Creative Commons makes it easy. That benefits both parties – licensee and licensor.

Now imagine that in other things we do all the time that require a contract. How about Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs). They are important and 99% of the time they are totally standard. But you still have to read each one to see that it is standard. What if you saw something like Creative Commons (like “NDA Commons”) and could say “OK, I know what that means, I will click to agree”.

What about boiler-plate clauses like Force Majeure or Limitation Of Liability. Do we really need to review those?

How about an Independent Contractor agreement that protects both parties reasonably?

Semantic Tech & Business Conference Returns to San Francisco

Semantic Tech & Business Conference returns to San Francisco in June! Join us from June 3-7 for complete coverage of Big Data, Linked Data, Extreme Information Management, and Semantic Web. From breakthrough approaches to solving business problems to the big data implications of fast–evolving technologies, SemTechBiz provides you with an unparalleled interactive experience and delivers tangible business value. We're offering a special early rate when you register by February 17. Sign up now!