We need to Standardize License Agreements

After reading this post, I thought that we should standardize privacy policies and license agreements. Let me explain what exactly I mean by that.


In class Dr. Chen expressed the need of having information in a machine readable format. For this purpose we mainly use standards like FOAF, OWL etc. Companies are supporting development of such standards because its in their interest to have all data on Web in machine readable format. They can make money out of it.


Similarly, why shouldn't we have a standard for license agreements and privacy policies? E.g. a site like Orkut or MySpace should publish usage and license information in some standard format.

E.g.

<company > Google </company >
<application > Orkut </application >
<profilemode > public </profilemode >
<informationlifetime >forever:) </informationlifetime >
<othertags>value </othertags>


This way, I will be able to decide whether I want to join a particular site or not. I will use some automated "Software Lawyer" that tells me the risk associated in joining a particular site.

But I am sure that these companies won't have such a thing because they all want to use our information in abnormal ways and they want to hide this fact using those 10 page license agreements.


What do you guys think? Or does there exist something similar to what I just proposed?