Martin Röscheisen · Stanford Computer Science (Digital Libraries Project)
A Network-Centric Design for Relationship-based Rights Management

Interoperable rights management is one of the service layers that the current Internet is still lacking. In this talk, I describe FIRM, a relationship-based approach to rights management in heterogeneous, networked environments that we have prototyped as part of the Stanford Digital Libraries project.

FIRM defines a platform for "smart contracts" that is based on a computational reification of contract law; it is realized as part of a novel, network-centric architecture for managing control information that generalizes previous models centered around clients or servers.

By radically reducing the transaction costs involved in managing one-to-one relationships, FIRM makes it possible to recast issues such as security and privacy from a "protection" framework into one where these properties are obtained as the ancillary of successfully managed one-to-one relationships.

Martin Röscheisen is a PhD student in Computer Science at Stanford. In addition to his research as part of the digital libraries project, he has developed other network-related systems, including a service targeted at the legal community, (the "Yahoo for Legal Profesionals") FindLaw and the LawCrawler, and hosts Eritrea Online/Dehai, the country network of Eritrea. He has also done infrastructure deployment planning for North-East Africa (here at Stanford as part of the Afronet project at the Communications Satellite Planning Center).