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.