Some Reflections on Copyright Management Systems and Laws Designed to Protect Them

Copyright management systems (CMS)—technologies that enable copyright owners to regulate reliably and charge automatically for access to digital works—are the wave of the very near future. The advent of digital networks, which make copying and distribution of digital content quick, easy, and undetectable, has provided the impetus for CMS research and development. CMS are premised on the concept of trusted systems or secure digital envelopes that protect copyrighted content and allow access and subsequent copying only to the extent authorized by the copyright owner. Software developers are testing prototype systems designed to detect, prevent, count, and levy precise charges for uses that range from downloading to excerpting to simply viewing or listening to digital works. In a few years, for example, an individual seeking online access to a collection of short fiction might be greeted with a menu of options including: Open and view short story A — $0.50, or$0.40 for students doing assigned reading (verified based on roster submitted by instructor) Open and view short story B (by a more popular author) — $0.80, or$0.70 for students Download short story A (encrypted and copy-protected) — $1.35 Download short story B —$2.25 Download entire collection — $15.00 Extract excerpt from short story A —$0.03 per 50 words Extract excerpt from short story B — $0.06 per 50 words CMS also loom large on the legislative horizon. Copyright owners have argued that technological protection alone will not deter unauthorized copying unless the law provides penalties for circumventing the technology. Although a bill to protect CMS against tampering failed to reach a vote in Congress last year, the World Intellectual Property Organization\u27s recent adoption of treaty provisions requiring protection means that Congress must revisit the question soon. Part II describes these developments. The seemingly inexorable trend toward a digital CMS regime raises two questions, which the author addresses in parts III and IV, respectively. First, broadly drawn protection for CMS has the potential to proscribe technologies that have indisputably lawful uses and also to foreclose, as a practical matter, uses of copyrighted works that copyright law expressly permits. How may protection for CMS be drafted to avoid disrupting the current copyright balance? Second, and equally fundamental, CMS may enable both pervasive monitoring of individual reading activity and comprehensive private legislation designed to augment—and possibly alter beyond recognition—the default rules that define and delimit copyright owners\u27 rights. Given the unprecedented capabilities of these technologies, is it also desirable to set limits on their reach

Digital Image Access & Retrieval

The 33th Annual Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing, held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in March of 1996, addressed the theme of "Digital Image Access & Retrieval." The papers from this conference cover a wide range of topics concerning digital imaging technology for visual resource collections. Papers covered three general areas: (1) systems, planning, and implementation; (2) automatic and semi-automatic indexing; and (3) preservation with the bulk of the conference focusing on indexing and retrieval.published or submitted for publicatio

JISC Preservation of Web Resources (PoWR) Handbook

Handbook of Web Preservation produced by the JISC-PoWR project which ran from April to November 2008. The handbook specifically addresses digital preservation issues that are relevant to the UK HE/FE web management community”. The project was undertaken jointly by UKOLN at the University of Bath and ULCC Digital Archives department

BlogForever D3.3: Development of the Digital Rights Management Policy

This report presents a set of recommended practices and approaches that a future BlogForever repository can use to develop a digital rights management policy. The report outlines core legal aspects of digital rights that might need consideration in developing policies, and what the challenges are, in particular, in relation to web archives and blog archives. These issues are discussed in the context of the digital information life cycle and steps that might be taken within the workflow of the BlogForever platform to facilitate the gathering and management of digital rights information. Further, the reports on interviews with experts in the field highlight current perspectives on rights management and provide empirical support for the recommendations that have been put forward

Identity in research infrastructure and scientific communication: Report from the 1st IRISC workshop, Helsinki Sep 12-13, 2011

Motivation for the IRISC workshop came from the observation that identity and digital identification are increasingly important factors in modern scientific research, especially with the now near-ubiquitous use of the Internet as a global medium for dissemination and debate of scientific knowledge and data, and as a platform for scientific collaborations and large-scale e-science activities.

The 1 1/2 day IRISC2011 workshop sought to explore a series of interrelated topics under two main themes: i) unambiguously identifying authors/creators & attributing their scholarly works, and ii) individual identification and access management in the context of identity federations. Specific aims of the workshop included:

• Raising overall awareness of key technical and non-technical challenges, opportunities and developments.
• Facilitating a dialogue, cross-pollination of ideas, collaboration and coordination between diverse – and largely unconnected – communities.
• Identifying & discussing existing/emerging technologies, best practices and requirements for researcher identification.

This report provides background information on key identification-related concepts & projects, describes workshop proceedings and summarizes key workshop findings