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M. Ahmed, E. Weippl:
"Towards an Ontology-Based Solution for Managing License Agreement Using Semantic Desktop";
in: "Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES), Workshop on Frontiers in Availability, Reliability and Security (FARES 2010)", IEEE Press, 2010.

Whenever software is installed on a computer
system, one has to agree to the end-user license
agreement. The software license agreement grants
licensee certain rights in software usage, but usually
the ownership rights of the software stays with licensor.
The licensor may also hold the right to restrict the
usage of the software and can revoke the agreement if
the licensee violates the license terms. Without agreeing
with the license terms and conditions, the end-user is
not authorized to use the software and could face
penalties as described in the law. The main problem is
that the percentage of the users who actually read the
end-user license agreement which are almost
incomprehensible for the average software user is very
low.
Mostly the end-user does not pay much
attention to reading the license agreement because they
believe that nearly all the end-user license agreements
are practically the same. This misunderstanding makes
them not fully read the agreement and just scroll the
agreement and accept the terms and conditions. What
they do not realize is that by breaking the license
agreement they could be confronted with some
penalties as described in the law.
To overcome the problem of human
inefficiency of understanding the license agreement, we
have introduced a machine readable representation of
the license agreement based on Semantic Web
Technologies.