An approach to the formal analysis of license interoperability

With recent advances in information and telecommunications technologies, a large range of digital content is distributed over the Internet. Whereas diverse licenses are provided to protect the content legally and have the advantage of offering authors many choices, the obstruction of smooth content distribution may occur if the relationships between licenses are not revealed because of differences between the restrictions imposed by each license. To activate digital content distribution, license interoperability must be revealed. In this paper, we propose a framework for formally examining license interoperability by using many-sorted first-order logic. We formalize five actual licenses and examine their interoperability to prove the effectiveness of our proposed framework. The results show that the framework reveals the relationships between licenses.

Graphical abstractFigure optionsDownload full-size imageDownload as PowerPoint slideHighlights► We define a framework to formally examine license interoperability. ► On the framework, we provided a formalization for CC, NiC, GFDL, DSL, and FBSDDL. ► We verified the interoperability of the licenses and its validity based on the formalization.