Digital Rights Management session at ALA Annual

[Lloyd Davidson <Ldavids@northwestern.edu>]

At the Annual ALA conference in San Francisco,
on Sunday, June 17, 2001,  9:00 AM to 12:30 PM , Marriott Hotel, Salon 7,
The Electronic Publishing/Electronic Journals IG of LITA will present:

Digital Rights Management Systems: How They Will Affect Intellectual
Property Rights, Information Access and Libraries

Digital rights management systems control access and usage of digital
material and their successful deployment is essential for the economic
survival of any company that wishes to profitably publish any type of
material on the Internet.  They are also on the verge of becoming a major
operational component of library services and are already having an impact
in controlling access to electronic books and journals.  However, besides
simply limiting access, they can further be used to protect against
copyright violations while providing many of the fair use rights and other
privileges scholarly communities consider essential.  This session will
attempt to begin defining a set of solutions that fits the needs of
intellectual property creators, owners and users.

Speakers will include, in this order:

Clifford Lynch, Executive Director of CNI and one of the library
community's best synthesizers of information about technology's impact on
libraries.

Mark Stefik, Author of "The Internet Edge: Social Legal, and Technological
Challenges for a Networked World" (MIT Press, 2000) and the original
developer of the software that became ContentGuard, one of the major
digital rights management systems.  He is currently a research fellow at
Xerox PARC and manager of the Human-Document Interaction Area in the
Information Sciences and Technology Laboratory.

Dennis McNannay, Recently Vice President at InterTrust Technologies,
currently one of the most successful digital rights management companies,
and a recognized expert on digital rights management systems. Prasad Ram,
Previously General Manager of ContentGuard when it was at Xerox, and now
co-founder, with Carol Risher (recently of AAP), of Savantech, a company
developing digital media distribution solutions in support of digital
commerce.

James Neal, Dean of University Libraries & the Sheridan Director, Johns
Hopkins University and nationally known speaker on digital issues and
electronic publishing.

Lloyd Davidson, Northwestern University, Moderator