Related papers: A Logic for Reasoning about Digital Rights

Smart Contracts use computer technology to automate the performance of aspects of commercial agreements. Yet how can there be confidence that the computer code is faithful to the intentions of the parties? To understand the depth and…

Logic has proved essential for formally modeling software based systems. Such formal descriptions, frequently called specifications, have served not only as requirements documentation and formalisation, but also for providing the…

In this paper, we summarize work-in-progress on expert system support to automate some data deposit and release decisions within a data repository, and to generate custom license agreements for those data transfers. Our approach formalizes…

Legal interpretation is a linguistic venture. In judicial opinions, for example, courts are often asked to interpret the text of statutes and legislation. As time has shown, this is not always as easy as it sounds. Matters can hinge on…

This paper provides a taxonomy for the licensing of data in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The paper's goal is to build towards a common framework for data licensing akin to the licensing of open source…

Program logics are a powerful formal method in the context of program verification. Can we develop a counterpart of program logics in the context of language verification? This paper proposes language logics, which allow for statements of…

This article illustrates the use of a logical specification language to capture various forms of confidentiality properties used in the security literature.

There is a multitude of licenses out there for a software developer to choose from, but a lot of programmers would prefer to not have to have a legal degree in order to understand them and would rather just have their code out in the public…

System requirements related to concepts like information flow, knowledge, and robustness cannot be judged in terms of individual system executions, but rather require an analysis of the relationship between multiple executions. Such…

There is a growing interest in running legal contracts on digital systems, at the same time, it is important to understand to what extent software contracts may capture legal content. We then undertake a foundational study of legal…

We consider the problem of evaluating, and comparing computational policies in the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL), which has become the de facto standard for governing the access and usage of digital resources. Although preliminary…

The paper discusses legal aspects relevant to the development of research software and practical approaches taken by research software engineers to deal with them. Intellectual Property Rights on software are considered alongside licensing…

When a decision, such as the approval or denial of a bank loan, is delegated to a computer, an explanation of that decision ought to be given with it. This ethical need to explain the decisions leads to the search for a formal definition of…

This article examines two approaches to verification, one based on using a logic for expressing properties of a system, and one based on showing the system equivalent to a simpler system that obviously has whatever property is of interest.…

We introduce the logic LRC, designed to describe and reason about agents' abilities and capabilities in using resources. The proposed framework bridges two - up to now - mutually independent strands of literature: the one on logics of…

XrML is becoming a popular language in industry for writing software licenses. The semantics for XrML is implicitly given by an algorithm that determines if a permission follows from a set of licenses. We focus on a fragment of the language…

Checking the compliance of software against laws, regulations and contracts is increasingly important and costly as the embedding of software into societal practices is becoming more pervasive. Moreover, the digitalised services provided by…

If code is law, then the language of law is a programming language. Lawyers and legal scholars can learn about law by studying programming-language theory, and programming-language tools can be usefully applied to legal problems. This…

Formal verification provides strong guarantees of correctness of software, which are especially important in safety or security critical systems. Hoare logic is a widely used formalism for rigorous verification of software against…

We speak of a \textit{computational law} when that law is intended to be enforced by software through an automated decision-making process. As digital technologies evolve to offer more solutions for public administrations, we see an…