Abstract
Knowledge-based systems can make a contribution to the difficult problem of regulating copyright on the internet. Regulation with law alone presents significant jurisdictional and enforcement difficulties whereas regulation with the use of encryption has the effect of removing legitimate public access to works for research, private study or criticism. Knowledge-based systems proposed here operate at five junctures: creating works, uploading works to a network, transmitting the work across the internet, downloading a work and using the creation. For each system, we apply an agent-based architecture that defines the actors, the knowledge all agents share about the world and a protocol, based on Habermasian speech acts to interact with other agents. The shared knowledge, and beliefs about the world, that each agent holds is represented with the use of arguments at two levels, the generic and the actual argument level. This application of argumentation extends our previous work in family law and refugee law.