Rights management to enable a true Internet of Things

In this paper, we argue that the determining aspect of the `Internet of Things' (IoT) is the accessibility of `things' on the global Internet, as opposed to a simple interconnection of networked `things'. We observe that most reported applications of the `Internet of Things' would be more accurately described as `Intranets of Things'. In large part due to understandable concerns about the security of. In the wider field of the Internet `in the large', the open mining of the Web for information has become the mainstay of many genres of research. We give an example of how in one project the prospect of using IoT data in a similar way has been validated to an extent on the basis that data owners voluntarily made their data available. We suggest that there are two services that need to be provided in order for the generalized information mining that occurs on the Internet-at-large to occur in the Internet of Things. The first is a means of cataloguing available data, which is already being addressed by services such as HyperCAT. The second is an automatic rights management service (IoT-RM), which would manage the rights and permissions and allow data owners to determine in advance to whom their data should be released, for what purposes, subject to which restrictions (such as, for instance, anonymisation) and whether any remuneration should be involved. We make some concrete proposals about the form that such an IoT-RM should take.