Determinants in the on-line distribution of digital content: an exploratory analysis

This article shows the phases – and discusses the results – of an empirical analysis addressing the legal business models that are adopted online to distribute digital content

The Future of the Internet III

Presents survey results on technology experts' predictions on the Internet's social, political, and economic impact as of 2020, including its effects on integrity and tolerance, intellectual property law, and the division between personal and work lives

Emerging technologies for learning (volume 1)

Collection of 5 articles on emerging technologies and trend

Edusource: Canada's Learning Object Repository Network

An alliance of Canadian Universities and government agencies pooled their resources to establish a network to share and combine Learning Objects from a variety of sources and further develop this technology. In the process, they resolved many learning, logistical, and legal problems and moved this technology forward by an order of magnitude. Principal goals include: nationwide interoperability, network of repositories, linked servers, repository software programs, national and international standards, digital rights management, business and management models, evaluation and feedback, dissemination of results, and bilingual access to all Canadians, particularly learners with disabilities. The defined tasks were sub-divided into nine work packages, each with a lead institution as package manager

Enabling content and rights transmission in the educational field with ARMS

Authorship and content integrity are the most basic rights that academic authors want to preserve in the educational field. In order to preserve these author rights a special adapted DRM platform, ARMS, was developed. This platform is oriented to the educational domain and we must to highlight the web services interface with a generic educational Academic Management System platform of the educational institution, established in order to verify the user eligibility in this domain before issuance of the license. To guarantee content and rights protection, cryptographic techniques and mechanisms are applied in a fashion where content, rights, protection keys and related metadata are packaged in special containers obeying the MPEG-21 standard. The resulting objects describe here, obeys a special structure where protected objects may only be used by the user of the educational domain to whom the respective license was issued embedded in one of these objects. These neutral resulting objects can then be easily transmissible in open communications channels in a way that enable their management in order to achieve a controlled access and usage. They are the main data transport bodies that enable content protection and rights transmission among participants in content protection lifecycle.info:eu-repo/semantics/submittedVersio

Digital Rights Management and Consumer Acceptability: A Multi-Disciplinary Discussion of Consumer Concerns and Expectations

The INDICARE project – the Informed Dialogue about Consumer Acceptability of DRM Solutions in Europe – has been set up to raise awareness about consumer and user issues of Digital Rights Management (DRM) solutions. One of the main goals of the INDICARE project is to contribute to the consensus-building among multiple players with heterogeneous interests in the digital environment. To promote this process and to contribute to the creation of a common level of understanding is the aim of the present report. It provides an overview of consumer concerns and expectations regarding DRMs, and discusses the findings from a social, legal, technical and business perspective. A general overview of the existing EC initiatives shows that questions of consumer acceptability of DRM have only recently begun to draw wider attention. A review of the relevant statements, studies and reports confirms that awareness of consumer concerns is still at a low level. Five major categories of concerns have been distinguished so far: (1) fair conditions of use and access to digital content, (2) privacy, (3) interoperability, (4) transparency and (5) various aspects of consumer friendliness. From the legal point of view, many of the identified issues go beyond the scope of copyright law, i.e. the field of law where DRM was traditionally discussed. Often they are a matter of general or sector-specific consumer protection law. Furthermore, it is still unclear to what extent technology and an appropriate design of technical solutions can provide an answer to some of the concerns of consumers. One goal of the technical chapter was exactly to highlight some of these technical possibilities. Finally, it is shown that consumer acceptability of DRM is important for the economic success of different business models based on DRM. Fair and responsive DRM design can be a profitable strategy, however DRM-free alternatives do exist too.Digital Rights Management; consumers; Intellectual property; business models

ARMS: A new approach to control content sharing and rights distribution

As in other areas, one of the main issues in the educational sector is related with content distribution and sharing. Ensuring that the terms and conditions stated by content owners on the license are respected by the other participants of the value chain, such as distributors (eg. teachers) or consumers (eg. students) is a concern. The assignment of licenses is a need in order to the distributor in the DRM system unambiguously communicate the licensing of the content giving an enhanced user experience. Not only is important to validate the issued license verifying if the terms and the conditions stated in the parental license are respected in the child license but also is important to verify if this license is generated to users that are in a controlled domain. In this paper we will describe our rights-sharing control mechanism based in MPEG-21 standard that augments the control over a domain (the institution educational domain) through the validation of the license to be generated. Through a specific DRM system oriented to the educational context (ARMS - Academic Rights Management System) content owners are allowed to control which users can obtain a license within the constraints imposed by him, giving them the power to control the content usage in the educational domain. To enable this feature some special control mechanism, MPEG-21 based, were implemented in order to control the license issuance. With these verification mechanisms is possible to make the license distributor act like a domain controller regulating the issuance of licenses in the educational context. Our proposal, when applied in the educational domain, greatly increases the expressive power of digital rights management framework without requiring an upgrade to end-user devices.info:eu-repo/semantics/submittedVersio