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4 J. Int'l Com. L. & Tech. 1 (2009)

handle is hein.journals/jcolate4 and id is 1 raw text is: Journal of International Commercial Law and Technology

Service Orientation: Licensing Perspectives
G.R.Gangadharan
Telematica Instituut, Enschede, The Netherlands
gr@telin.nl
Vincenzo D'Andrea
University of Trento, Trento, Italy
dandrea ,disi.unitn.it
Abstract. Services proliferate in myriad domains, with their seamless potentiality, raising
new issues such as the need to articulate rights and obligations associated with services. The current
research on services insights primarily on the aspects of technology and sparsely focuses on
business and intellectual values associated with services. Service licensing is a promising way to
manage the normative aspects of the relationship between service consumers and service providers.
Conceptualizing service licenses and making them in machine interpretable form would promote
broader usage of services. In this paper, we analyze and formalize service licensing clauses and
unambiguously describe a service license in machine interpretable form.
Keywords: Web Services, Service Oriented Computing, Intellectual Rights, Licenses, Rights Expression
Languages
1. Introduction
Service Oriented Computing (SOC) allows the software-as-a-service concept to expand to include the delivery of
complex business process and transactions as a service, allowing applications to be constructed on the fly and
services to be reused everywhere (Alonso et al., 2004). Services are autonomous, platform independent, business
functions that are published and described using standard description and publication languages. They are
remotely invocable over different networks using standard protocols. A service is represented by an interface part
defining the functionality visible to the external world and an implementation part realizing the interface. A
service can be accessed whenever required. However, a service remains idle until a request for invocation arrives.
In a dynamic market environment, the usage of services is governed by agreements that specify the terms
and conditions of using and provisioning the services. A license is an agreement between parties which includes
all transactions between the licensor and the licensee, in which the licensor agrees to grant the licensee the right to
use and access the asset under predefined terms and conditions (Classen, 1996).
The concept of software licensing has emerged when the production and sale of individual software came
into the market. While licensing was already present in the software world, the move to mass market software has
introduced shrink wrap licenses, the terms of which can only be read and accepted by the consumer after using the
product. With the advent of the Internet-based marketing and distribution strategies, click wrap licensing (similar
to shrink wrap licensing) continues as one of the universal practices. The transformation from software as a
product to software-as-a-service is the reflection of the transition of the distribution of software. As SOC extends
the concept of software-as-a-service to include the delivery of complex business processes as a service, there arises
a requirement for developing service licensing strategies.
Similar to software licensing, service licensing is extremely important for distribution of services. Software
serves as a stand-alone application. In contrast, the rationale behind services is making network accessible
operations available anywhere and anytime. A consequence is that while software is separately installed and
executed using the computing resources internal to an organization, a service is often executed using external
resources. In addition, while software is designed with particular use in mind, services are designed to facilitate
potential reuse. The design of services supports loose coupling, wherein a service acquires knowledge of another
services, still remaining independent. Software is designed to incorporate a set of specific functions and usually is
not allowed to be integrated with other software. Further, software could be restricted by the organizational
boundaries and could not communicate with other software crossing the boundaries. The fundamental to service
orientation is to design services to encourage composition. Thus, the distinguishing characteristics and nature of
services prevent services directly to adopt the licensing models of software.
One could question if licenses are a legal artefact applicable to services. First of all we notice that the
service implementation is by means of software, so that part of a service would be license-able. The service
interface is also license-able, being the result of intellectual work aimed at describing the service functionalities

Vol. 4, Issue 1 (2009)

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