Managing copyrights and moral rights of service-based software

Abstract

Software has traditionally been perceived as a product, requiring possession and ownership to receive the desired performance. The evolution of software into services imposes certain concerns in the form of expressing and accessing services. The seamless proliferation of services demands a new kind of software protection with respect to copyrights and moral rights of service-based software to enable services' widespread use. This article describes a spectrum of rights that arises in using and accessing services. The authors present the expression of these rights (as a service license) using the Open Digital Rights Language for Services (ODRL-S). To evaluate their approach, they present a case study on service license compliance verification based on a European Project COMPAS that uses service licenses described in ODRL-S. © 2011 IEEE.