Service Commons -- Serve and Serve Alike: Applying the Creative Commons Spirit to Web Services

Abstract

This paper addresses the Terms of Service (ToS) in a contract between a service provider and a client. To generally handle any types of agreement between parties, several approaches have been proposed by researchers and proprietary vendors. However, the description of a typical ToS usually involves legal terms and expressions that are quite difficult both for developers and machines (programs) to represent and understand. To address this difficulty in the real world, we propose standardized semantic definitions of common ToS patterns that are supported by three-layer descriptions in a ToS: descriptions for developers, for lawyers, and for machines. We borrow this concept from the Creative Commons (CC) licenses, which are standardized licenses with three-layer descriptions for distributing copyrighted creative content, and apply it to licensed Web-based services. We have ported the primitive components in the CC licenses for ToS purposes, and combined them to produce 6 feasible licenses as a Service Commons, typical ToS patterns for free-of-charge services.