Approximating Fair Use in LicenseScript

Current rights management systems are not able to enforce copyright laws because of both legal and technological reasons. The contract rights granted by a copyright owner typically restrict the users' statutory rights that are endorsed by copyright laws. In particular, Fair Use allows these `unauthorized but not illegal' rights. Two technological reasons why fair use cannot be upheld: (1) the current XML-based rights expression language (REL) cannot capture user's statutory rights; and (2) the underlying architectures cannot support copyright enforcement. This paper focuses on the first problem and introduces a two-pronged approach: (1) rights assertion, to allow a user assert new rights to the license, i.e. freely express her rights under fair use; and (2) audit logging, to record the asserted rights and keep track of the copies rendered and distributed under fair use. We apply this approach in LicenseScript (a logic-based REL) to demonstrate how LicenseScript can approximate fair use easily.