License Authentication via Third-Party Authority
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Solution Overview
Problem
In collaborative development environments, the risk of infringing content owners' rights in aggregated software products is high due to unclear legal rights, obligations, restrictions, and prohibitions among multiple entities, making it difficult to ensure license authenticity and avoid legal/financial liabilities.
Innovation Solution
A trusted, third-party license authority authenticates licenses by using license profiles and content identifiers, validating them independently to ensure authenticity and determine risk measures, thereby mitigating the risk of infringing content owners' rights.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If multiple entities collaborate to develop software elements and share them in collaborative development environments, then productivity and innovation increase, but the risk of infringing content owners' rights increases due to obfuscated legal rights and obligations
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces a trusted license authority as an intermediary between content owners and collaborative developers. This authority issues digital certificates that bind content identifiers to license information, providing a reliable verification mechanism that resolves the contradiction by enabling productivity through collaboration while maintaining reliability through authenticated license verification
Solution Approach 2:
The system implements feedback mechanisms where license information is continuously verified against the trusted authority's certificates. This feedback loop ensures that collaborative developers can confirm license authenticity at any point in the development process, maintaining reliability while enabling ongoing collaborative productivity
2Reliability
If content owners explicitly set forth rights, obligations, restrictions and prohibitions in licenses for aggregated content, then legal protection improves, but the complexity of managing and verifying licenses increases as the number of collaborating entities increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments license information into discrete, machine-readable components including content identifiers, license terms, and digital certificates. This segmentation allows complex legal protections to be broken down into manageable verification units that can be automatically processed, reducing management complexity while maintaining comprehensive legal protection
Solution Approach 2:
The system transforms unstructured license documents into structured parameters including digital certificates, content identifiers, and machine-readable license terms. This parameterization enables automated verification processes that reduce management complexity while preserving the full scope of legal protections
3Reliability
If a trusted third-party license authority validates license profiles and content identifiers, then the risk of infringing rights is reduced, but the time and resources required for authentication increase
Solution Approach 1:
The trusted license authority performs preliminary validation and issues digital certificates before collaborative development begins. This preliminary action establishes authenticated license information in advance, reducing infringement risk while minimizing authentication time during actual development by eliminating the need for repeated full validations
Data Source
AI summary
The disclosed technology can mitigate the risk of infringing a content owner's rights in legally-protectable content by operating as a trusted, third-party license authority between content owners and content users to ensure that a license governing at least some aspects of the protectable content is authentic and thus validly represents the restrictions imposed by content owners pertaining to the use, distribution, modification, combination, interaction, and/or other manipulation of such content. An identifier representative of the protectable content together with a profile of the license (which may include attributes that specify particular restrictions, uses, and interactions pertaining to the protectable content) can serve as a basis for determining the authenticity of the license associated with the protectable content. The protectable content can correspond to one or more multimedia presentations, video segments, audio segments, textual representations, works of art, visual representations, technological know-how, business know-how, contract rights, and/or software elements.