Green paper on copyright, II

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" (US Constitution)

 In 1993 the US government issued a green paper on copyright and the Internet. At the time the latter was being referred to as the "National Information Infrastructure" or NII. That green paper led to a white paper called: Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure. The conclusions in this paper led to government efforts like the DMCA, as well as the as-yet unresolved questions about the library exceptions in section 108 of the copyright law.

Twenty years later we have another green paper on copyright and the Internet. It is, as are nearly all government documents, long and complex, and I hope to find time to do a comparison of the two papers to see if we have progressed in this area. But from a first reading I believe I can say that there is something that the two papers have in common: who they consider to be a creator and a rights holder.

It won't surprise you to learn that the emphasis in papers I and II is on the commercial content production communities: books, movies, music, newspapers.   As quoted in the press release,

“We see a digital future in which the relationship among digital technology, the Internet, and creative industries becomes increasingly symbiotic,” said Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information and NTIA Administrator Lawrence E. Strickling. “In this digital future, the rights of creators and copyright owners are appropriately protected; creative industries continue to make their substantial contributions to the nation’s economic competitiveness; online service providers continue to expand the variety and quality of their offerings; technological innovation continues to thrive; and consumers have access to the broadest possible range of creative content.”

Oddly, he seems to be describing the Internet that I interact with today, but calls it the digital future. Nowhere, however, is there a mention of the rights of creators of Facebook pages, Google+ entries, Youtube videos, or tweets. A distinction is often made between creators and consumers, yet through social media and Internet publication methods (like blogging), that division is less valid than it was in the past.

Nor does the report admit that there is a the vast amount of content that is user-supplied and highly consumed, like Youtube, and that this content exceeds, both in publication and in consumption, the commercial offerings that the authors of the report are so concerned about. Hearings held to discuss the first green paper had industry representatives saying that the Internet would not be a "success" if commercial and entertainment content was not available, as if the Internet at the time (1994) were just an empty shell waiting for Time-Warner and Disney and Thomson-Reuters to come along and fill it up. Bruce Lehman, chairman of the committee producing the green and white papers, said to Congress in 1995:

 Creators, publishers and distributors of works will be wary of the electronic marketplace unless the law provides them the tools to protect their property against unauthorized use. Thus, the full potential of the NII will not be realized if the education, information and entertainment products protected by intellectual property laws are not protected effectively when disseminated via the NII.

In case you weren't there at the time, the Internet in 1994 was a thriving community with huge amounts of content. It was less flashy than today's Internet, since the technology did not yet allow for the efficient streaming of video and sound, and downloading a photograph could take a while. But it was not languishing for lack of content. This goes many-fold for the Internet today, but the representatives of the commercial content industries are somehow oblivious to any content that isn't making money for them. And that includes every Youtube upload, every Facebook page, bazillions of Flickr photographs, countless tweets.

Here are some stats from Youtube and Hulu, taken from their sites. Admittedly, Youtube is not 100% non-commercial and Hulu is not 100% pay-for-view, but this still shows that Youtube and its crowd-sourced content should be counted as real content in the sense of the green paper on copyright. But it isn't.

Hulu

 Number of Hulu video views in the past year     457 million
Total number of people who watched Hulu at least once in the past year     38 million
Number of Hulu video views in the past year     457 million
Average number of videos a Hulu watcher views     12
Average length of time a person spends on Hulu     1hr 13min
Number of devices in use that Hulu is available on     120 million
Percentage of people who use Hulu and only watch television shows     73 %
Percent of people who use Hulu to watch movies     9 %
Percent of videos viewed online that Hulu makes up     4 %
Percent growth for Hulu from 2010 to 2011     60 %
Total revenue made in 2011 by Hulu     $420 million

Youtube

More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month
Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube—that's almost an hour for every person on Earth, and 50% more than last year
100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
YouTube is localized in 56 countries and across 61 languages
According to Nielsen, YouTube reaches more US adults ages 18-34 than any cable network

So Youtube got 12 billion unique visitors in a year, to Hulu's 457 million. You'd think data like that would have an impact on the thinking of these folks. And the fact that Youtube reaches more viewers in the key demographic than cable TV should also shake up some media executives. In addition, those who upload content to Youtube are rights holders, as the Youtube terms of use makes clear:

For clarity, you retain all of your ownership rights in your Content. However, by submitting Content to YouTube, you hereby grant YouTube a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content in connection with the Service

You would also think that the report would address these Youtube content providers as creators, just as those who add content to Facebook pages are creators. But these creators are somehow not real creators in the minds of the writers of the report, and their needs are not addressed. No where does the report decry the exploitation, without compensation, of the work of these creators by industry giants like Facebook and Google. If someone else is making money off of your content it's bad, unless you aren't one of us, and therefore it's ok. The 99.99% of us who do not own the means of production and distribution must cede our rights in order to participate in the creation of content.

The report urges Congress to criminalize the unauthorized streaming of copyrighted works. Copyright law violations are subject to civil penalties, so this greatly ups the threat level for violations. This also revives one of the disputed and hated aspects of the famed "Stop Online Piracy Act," (SOPA) which was defeated through massive activism.

The upshot is that copyright will benefit those who create industrially, but not the millions who create individually. We should just admit that copyright law no longer has anything to do with creativity or social impact, and instead rename it to the "copyright industries law." As the 2013 green paper explains:

The industries that rely on copyright law are today an integral part of our economy, accounting for 5.1 million U.S. jobs in 2010—a figure that has grown dramatically over the past two decades. In that same year, these industries contributed 4.4 percent of U.S. GDP, or approximately $641 billion.

That's what this green paper, and the previous green paper, and all of the changes to copyright in the centuries since the time of the US Constitution, are really saying. Very little of what is protected today, and very little of what contributes to that $641 billion, is either Science or a useful Art. The founding fathers were writing at a time when science and technology defined progress, and progress defined prosperity. They did not, and could not have, anticipated the rise of leisure time and the media that would allow the creation of a huge economic center based on entertainment (including infotainment, which covers much news reporting today). Ironically, real Science is being encouraged to provide its content as Open Access. It's time to openly state that copyright law today is not what the founding fathers had in mind.

Update: Excellent blog post on the Green Paper and copyright by Kevin Smith.

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Addendum: I just re-discovered the CPSR statement on the NII from 1994, and it contains this paragraph which is so sadly insightful:

An imaginative view of the risks of an NII designed without sufficient attention to public-interest needs can be found in the modern genre of dystopian fiction known as "cyberpunk." Cyberpunk novelists depict a world in which a handful of multinational corporations have seized control, not only of the physical world, but of the virtual world of cyberspace. The middle-class in these stories is sedated by a constant stream of mass-market entertainment that distracts them from the drudgery and powerlessness of their lives. It doesn't take a novelist's imagination to recognize the rapid concentration of power and the potential danger in the merging of major corporations in the computer, cable, television, publishing, radio, consumer electronics, film, and other industries. We would be distressed to see an NII shaped solely by the commercial needs of the entertainment, finance, home shopping, and advertising industries.

Wikipedia as a learning experience

I have recently attended a few Wikipedia editing sessions and become interested in contributing more to Wikipedia. There is much editing to be done on pages relating to libraries and librarians; some of those pages are quite inadequate, and many have been marked as such using the Wikipedia coded messages that point out problems. The page for the LCCN is a stub, for example. Search on Sears Subject headings and what you get is a pretty poor page for Minnie Earl Sears with some information about the subject headings. Lately I've been updating the page on the Dewey Decimal Classification, which had little background information and did not have appropriate citations. I hope to move from there to the rather strange page that "compares" DDC and the LC Classification.

I estimate that I spent between 20 and 40 hours doing the research for my updates to the DDC page. The reason for that is that the Wikipedia standard requires that all facts be sourced. Add to that the requirement for a neutral point of view (called NPOV in wiki-speak), and a good Wikipedia page is a set of sourced facts, with some clear writing connecting them. (And, yes, there are a lot of not-good Wikipedia pages.)

It occurred to me that if I were a teacher I could use Wikipedia as a learning experience. Wanting your favorite topic to be well-represented in Wikipedia is a great motivator. Having to source all of your facts (and being pretty much limited to facts) means having to do research. Doing research becomes a good activity for discussing how to find sources and how to evaluate them.

Then I thought: wouldn't it be great to run a Wikipedia editing session in a library? What better place to have access to the sources? An editing session in a library with reference librarians on hand sounds like a Wikipedian's dream, and it could be used to teach people how to use the library.

Have you done this? I'd like to know.

Linked Data First Steps & Catch-21

Often when I am with groups of librarians talking about linked data, this question comes up:

"What can we do TODAY to get ready for linked data?"

It's not really a hard question, because, at least in my mind, there is an obvious starting point: identifiers. We can begin today to connect the textual data in our bibliographic records with identifiers for the same thing or concept.

What identifiers exist? Thanks to the Library of Congress we have identifiers for all of our authority controlled elements: names and subjects. (And if you are outside of the US, look to your national library for their work in this area, or connect to the Virtual International Authority File where you can.) LoC also provides identifiers for a number of the controlled lists used in MARC21 data.

The linked data standards require that identifiers be in the form of an HTTP-based URI. What this means is that your identifier looks like a URL. The identifier for me in the LC name authority file is:

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n89613425

Any bibliographic data with my name in a field should also contain this identifier. (OK, admittedly that's not a lot of bib data.) That brings us to "Catch-21" -- the MARC21 record. Although a control subfield was added to MARC21 for identifiers ($0), that subfield requires the identifier to be in a MARC21-specific format:

The control number or identifier is preceded by the appropriate MARC Organization code (for a related authority record) or the Standard Identifier source code (for a standard identifier scheme), enclosed in parentheses.

The example in the MARC21 documentation is:

100 1#$aBach, Johann Sebastian.$4aut$0(DE-101c)310008891

Modified to use LC name authorities that would be:

 100 1#$aBach, Johann Sebastian,$d1685-1750$0(LoC)n79021425

The contents of the $0 therefore is not a linked data identifier even in those instances where we have a proper linked data identifier for the name.  Catch-21. I therefore suggest that, as an act of Catch-21 disobedience, we all declare that we will ignore the absurdity of having recently added an anti-linked data identifier subfield to our standard, and use it instead for standard HTTP URIs:

100 1#$aBach, Johann Sebastian,$d1685-1750$0http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79021425

Once we've gotten over this hurdle, we can begin to fill in identifiers for authority-controlled elements. Obviously we won't be doing this by hand, one record at a time. This should be part of a normal authority update service, or it may be feasible within systems that store and link national authority data to bibliographic records.

We should also insist that cataloging services that use the national authority files begin to include these subfields in bibliographic data as it is created/downloaded.

Note that because the linked data standard identifiers are HTTP URIs, aka URLs, by including these identifiers in your bibliographic data you have already created a link -- a link to the web page for that person or subject, and a link to a machine-readable form of the authority data in a variety of formats (MARCXML, JSON, RDF, and more). In the LC identifier service, the name authority data includes a link to the VIAF identifier for the person; the VIAF identifier for some persons is included in the Wikipedia page about the person; the Wikipedia identifier links you to DBpedia and the DBpedia identifier is used by Freebase ...

That's how it all gets started, with one identifier that becomes a kind of identifier snowball rolling down hill, collecting more and more links as it goes along.

Pretty easy, eh?

Librarians and the JK Rowling Effect

I'm sure that by now you've heard the story: a book by unknown author Robert Galbraith got good reviews but made only modest sales, until it was revealed that Galbraith was a pseudonym for JK Rowling. Within days it was "#1 with a bullet" on Amazon.

The book had reportedly sold only 500 copies in the US. The publisher most likely did not do a large print run. The hard copy has not yet made the New York Times best seller list, which is determined by sales. However, it is #1 on Amazon due to the infinite expandability of Kindle ebook copies.

This may be a kind of watershed moment for ebooks, a proof that in this world of instant access the ebook is not only good for readers (as in humans who read), but they have definite advantages for publishers. The primary message here, though, is that reputation sells. This is something that advertisers have known forever. Therefore I was surprised to come upon a short article in The Nation magazine from 1897(*)  that blames librarians for making authors famous by naming them and clearly disdains this fact.

"The role of the librarians in this country as critics of literature and arbiters of literary reputation is growingly apparent. 'Poole's Index to Periodical Literature' is of necessity selective, and the selection from each periodical embraced in the Index appertains to the particular librarian or library assistant specially charged with the care of that periodical. In most cases, the name of the author is ascertained and appended to the title, and so the aristocracy of current letters is called into being. Writers in this way come to be known for their range of subjects and interests; their weight is suggested by frequency of titles; editors and publishers will naturally apply to them as authorities."

Not only did librarians select literature for the index, they actually created recommended bibliographies!

"Not satisfied with this control at once of fame and research, the associated librarians got up a list of works recommendable for a library of five thousand volumes... Mr. Melvil Dewey... 'submitted to the librarians of the State [of New York] and others to obtain an expression of opinion respecting the best fifty books ... to be added to a village library."

The author of the piece (not named, by the way, at least not in the pages that I retrieved) saw this as "a pretty generous advertisement." My concern about the influence of libraries and librarians is quite different: access to knowledge determines future knowledge. Well, perhaps "determines" is too strong of a word, but let's say that what we can produce as new knowledge depends greatly on which giants are available to us, in the Newtonian sense of "standing on the shoulders of giants."

Oftentimes, the library has a role in providing those giants. In a small library, what the library owns will necessarily be a subset of the knowledge on a topic. In a large library, where the number of documents on a topic is way beyond the capability of most researchers to absorb, the organization of the materials will determine what researchers discover. Even if collection development were a perfect process, with unlimited funds, unlimited space, and absolute neutrality, the library in some way has an effect on future knowledge.

In that sense, Amazon and other booksellers have it easy: all that matters for them is the simple measure of sales. They don't have to, and probably do not, wonder if the world is or is not a better place now that we have Fifty Shades of Dubious Personal Interaction, and a new JK Rowling bestseller. Ironically, counting sales or hits or links is considered "neutral" while attempting to make a selection of the most important works in a subject area within a limited budged is looked at askance.

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* The Nation. vol. 64, no. 1663, May 13, 1897, p. 860

FRBR and schema.org

The FRBR structure for what it calls the Group 1 entities (Work, Expression, Manifestation, and Item, hereafter written as WEMI) presents quite a few problems for data modeling. Of the many issues this brings up, there is the fact that this division is not universally recognized, not even in library data, and definitely is not recognized outside of libraries. This has particular impact for library data as part of the linked data space, where a primary goal is interlinking with data from diverse resources. It is unlikely that online bookstores or academic citations will begin to use the WEMI structure.

One area where library bibliographic data and bibliographic data from other sources may mingle is in schema.org markup in web pages. Schema already has a basic class that can be used for bibliographic data, called "CreativeWork." Creative work contains the common elements for this type of description, like author, title, publisher, pages, subject, etc. Problems arise, therefore, when trying to express either WEMI or the simplified BIBFRAME Work and Instance (hereafter bf:Work, bf:Instance) in this model. CreativeWork is a unified model that includes all descriptive elements in a single set; BIBFRAME separates those elements into two entities, and each entity contains only a defined set of the descriptive elements. Thus, where CreativeWork will have information for author, title, publisher, pages, subject, in BIBFRAME author and subject must be described in the bf:Work entity, and title, publisher and pages in the bf:Instance entity. Between MARC, FRBR, BIBFRAME, and schema.org, a full bibliographic description may require one, two, or four separate entities.

The OCLC report on BIBFRAME and schema.org proposes that one could use CreativeWork for different FRBR (or presumably BIBFRAME) entities, making the determination based on what fields are present:

"In this scheme, it would be possible to say that when only titles, subjects, and creators are mentioned, the description for a Schema:CreativeWork refers to a FRBR Work; and when copyright dates and genres are present, the description is equivalent to a FRBR Expression." (p. 14)

While that makes sense from a pure logic point of view, and would probably work in a library database, it has problems within the web and linked data contexts of schema.org. I should note, before going on, that schema.org is metadata markup for any web site, and CreativeWork will be used for books, films, music, art, and other forms of creation by anyone and everyone on the web. This is not a library-specific standard.

First, there are many sites that have a search response page with limited information about the item, requiring the user to click through for details. A search results page for books on Amazon or Ebay gives only the author and title, but does not represent the Work -- it merely doesn't give the user the full data on that page in order to fit more results onto the page. Therefore, the lack of information on one web page does not mean that the description there is complete.

Second, there is no "record" in schema.org, merely a number of coded statements with values within a web page. Any web page can contain information about any number of "things" and information about those things may be placed anywhere on the page, possibly far from each other and not coded as a single unit. It may not be possible to know how complete a description is.

Third, web site owners can opt to mark up only part of their data. In schema.org markup that I have encountered on commercial sites, markup reflects the owner's view. For example, Google (one of the originators of schema.org) does not mark up the bibliographic data in its Books pages, but instead emphasizes user ratings, images, and subjects. (This shows the markup using the Google rich snippet testing tool.) In comparison, the extracted schema.org elements for an IMDB page is much more detailed, an indication that it considers itself an information site more than a sales site.

Finally, although this is somewhat beyond schema.org, should the data in web pages be incorporated into the linked data space, it will go there as individual triples that are part of a huge graph of data. That graph is theoretically limitless and makes use of a principle called the "open world assumption." In an open world it is not possible to base your assumptions on what is missing from the graph. The open world does not have a concept of completeness because there is always the possibility that there is more information than what you are seeing at any given moment in time.

These may not be the only arguments against the use of CreativeWork for different FRBR or BIBFRAME entities, but in my mind they are sufficient to make the case that if it is desirable to encode FRBR or BIBFRAME entities in schema.org that they must be represented by different schema.org classes and cannot be inferred from data elements in CreativeWork.

Before I end, let me make clear that I do not favor an imposition of FRBR-like separations of bibliographic data on the linked data world. Even the BIBFRAME two-part bibliographic description will have problems interacting with the one-entity model that is used outside of libraries. I do think that we can find a way to talk virtually about works without stripping such key elements as authors and subjects from the description of the package that carries the content. That package is, after all, what I hold in my hand when I read something, and it is a whole, with author, title, subjects, pages, binding, publisher, etc. That is, however, a topic for another post.

Spying, the old-fashioned way

While the news debates the NSA's PRISM program, a massive collection of data points of electronic communication, the more human side of spying is being pushed to the background. Yet if you are fearful of privacy invasion, there is nothing more chilling than a reading of FBI files with accounts of informants and statements about "Communist leanings" and "pro-Russian" attitudes. You can get a taste for this in the FBI Vault, a public file of de-classified documents, most of which are revealed upon the death of the target. The A-Z list (which appears to be a selection, as other names can be found with searches) is full of famous names, from Al Capone to Al Gore, from George Burns to Marilyn Monroe, and from Helen Keller to Leon Trotsky. (The list is only marginally alphabetical, by first name, which is almost as shocking as the contents of the files.)

This is old-fashioned stuff for the most part. Type-written letters, lots of scribbled initials, and whole chunks of documents blacked out with what must be a special FBI-invented marker.

On a more modern note, who could resist adding their favorite FOIA file to Facebook?

Not everyone in the Vault is a potential "enemy of the state." Some are there because they were threatened, and the FBI was doing its "protect and serve" job. But coming to the attention of the FBI is often not a good thing. In the case of Bradbury, an informant tipped off the Bureau that Bradbury may have attended a writers' meeting in Cuba. This set off an investigation.

"Investigation conducted in the neighborhood of 10265 Cheviot Drive, Los Angeles, California, disclosed that a RAY DOUGLAS BRADBURY, date of birth 8/22/20, Waukegan, Illinois, resides at this address. He is a known writer and Los Angeles indices have numerous references on RAY DOUGLAS BRADBURY."

The report is itself a boon for any biographers (and Wikipedians). It gives his family history (back to 1630), location and occupation of all living family members, information about his spouse (including the location of the church where they were married), and of course his yearly income. Given that this report is from 1959, you can just imagine how much more information the FBI would have today. There are whole pages that would do a reference librarian proud: a list of his professional memberships, a complete bibliography, film credits. There is even some level of literary analysis:

"... BRADBURY was probably sympathetic with certain pro-Communist elements in the [Writers Guild of America, West]... [Informant] stated it has been his observation that some of the writers suspected of having Communist backgrounds have been writing in the field of science fiction and it appears that science fiction may be a lucrative field for the introduction of Communist ideologies."

Admittedly, this was high "red scare" time still, and Bradbury was working in and around Hollywood. However, the informant seems to have been unfamiliar with the work of L. Ron Hubbard.

Every file here has some gems worth reading. And don't forget to check the category "Unexplained Phenomenon".

BIBFRAME Authorities

There is a discussion taking place on the BIBFRAME listserv about the draft proposal for BIBFRAME Authorities. I've made some comments, but this is a topic that requires diagrams, and therefore doesn't work well in email. This blog post is an illustrated comment on the BIBFRAME Authorities proposal.

The way I read the proposal, this diagram represents the current thinking on BIBFRAME Authorities:

Here is an example of a BIBFRAME authority representation from the document:

<!--  BIBFRAME Authority -->
<Person id="http://bibframe/auth/person/franklin">
      <label>Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790</label>
      <hasIDLink resource="http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79043402" />
      <hasVIAFLink resource="http://viaf.org/viaf/56609913" />
      <hasDNBLink resource="http://d-nb.info/gnd/118534912" />
</Person>

It is unclear to me what role or functionality the VIAF and DNB links are expected to have, so that is a question that I have. I don't know what "hasIDLink" means - whether that is specific to LCNA or means: "this is the authority file." If it does not mean that, then this does not link the BIBFRAME name display form specifically to the actual authority file that defined it. If it does mean that, then the three authority files are not treated consistently.

In addition, it does not appear that alternate name forms are including in the BIBFRAME Authority, so they are not available for indexing. That could just be something missing from the examples, however.

It would make more sense to me that if a BIBFRAME authority is needed in the BIBFRAME structure, to make a few changes. First, the alternate name forms would be included in the BIBFRAME authority, primarily for indexing. The preferred form of the name is obviously there for the purposes of display and indexing. The alternate forms are not displayed, but should be used in retrieval.

Another possible change is to make a direct link from the BIBFRAME authority to the library authority entry, in this case LCNA. Without this, it isn't clear how the two will be kept in sync as the LCNA file is updated. Links to other library authority files would be from the authority of record, which is what they are "nearly equivalent" to:

Note that this still links the annotations to the BIBFRAME authority. Other libraries using the LCNA data would not necessarily have access to annotations linked directly to the BIBFRAME authority, but that depends on how those authorities are shared. The advantage of this is that it shelters the "true authority" from possibly inappropriate stuff that might be associated with the BIBFRAME authority.

<!--  BIBFRAME Authority -->
<Person id="http://bibframe/auth/person/franklin">
      <label>Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790</label>

      <altLabel>Franklin, V. (Venīamin), 1706-1790</altLabel>

       <authority resource="http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79043402" />
</Person>

<!-- LC Name Authority -->

  <madsrdf:PersonalName rdf:about="http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79043402">

      <madsrdf:authoritativeLabel xml:lang="en">Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790

        </madsrdf:authoritativeLabel>

      <madsrdf:variantLabel xml:lang="en">Franklin, V. (Venīamin), 1706-1790

        </madsrdf:variantLabel> 

      <hasVIAFLink resource="http://viaf.org/viaf/56609913" />
      <hasDNBLink resource="http://d-nb.info/gnd/118534912" /> 

  </madsrdf:PersonalName>

The last option that I can propose is that of simply using the library authority. I believe that the argument against this is that such data may not always be available for record displays but as far as I know nothing prevents caching of high-use metadata statements ("triples" because it's all just triples after all), and refreshing these periodically to make sure one has the latest. In fact, it is probable that the linked data space will take a lesson from the Domain Name System, where a system of mirrors and backups distributes the DNS world-wide, syncs changes, and provides almost 100% availability. In that case, there would be no reason not to use ones' stated authority, with similarly coded local data existing where the authority data does not exist for the occasional local need.

<!--  BIBFRAME Authority -->
<Person id="http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79043402"></Person>

<!-- LC Name Authority -->

  <madsrdf:PersonalName rdf:about="http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79043402">

      <madsrdf:authoritativeLabel xml:lang="en">Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790

        </madsrdf:authoritativeLabel>

      <madsrdf:variantLabel xml:lang="en">Franklin, V. (Venīamin), 1706-1790

        </madsrdf:variantLabel> 

      <hasVIAFLink resource="http://viaf.org/viaf/56609913" />
      <hasDNBLink resource="http://d-nb.info/gnd/118534912" /> 

  </madsrdf:PersonalName>

To be sure, I am making some assumptions that should be explicit.

1. It's all triples. It's easy to forget this when looking at graphs.
2. Availability is a technical issue for which there is an answer (or more than one answer)
3. The main action in a linked data space is a query. This is not only for traditional discovery, but also for forming displays. To display a person's name will be a query for a "label" linked to a URI. It doesn't matter whether the URI is a BIBFRAME authority URI, an LCNA URI, or a DNB URI -- each of those is a triple in linked data space.