Call for input on digital rights management

[Ann Okerson <ann.okerson@yale.edu>]

This thread on diglib may be of interest to many readers of liblicense-l.
If this topic interests you, please make your views known to members
of the working party.  With thanks to Patrick Durusau  and Robin Cover.

***
Date: Wed, 03 Jul 2002 09:08:51 -0400
From: Patrick Durusau <pdurusau@emory.edu>
<w.mccarty@btinternet.com>)" <willard@lists.village.virginia.edu>
Subject: Re: 16.102 call for input on digital rights management

Greetings,

I deeply appreciate Robin Cover's post to the list requesting DRM
requirements and would urge the academic community to response
appropriately, even given the rather short deadline for requirements (7
August 2002).

In terms of deciding to devote summer hours to this task, please consider
the membership of this TC:

Hari Reddy, Chairperson ContentGuard
Carlisle Adams, Entrust
Bob Atkinson, Microsoft
Thomas DeMartini, ContentGuard
John Erickson, H.P.
Brad Gandee, Secretary ContentGuard
Bob Glushko, CommerceOne
Thomas Hardjono, Verisign
Hal Lockhart, Entegrity
M. Paramasivam, Microsoft
David Parrott, Reuters
Harry Piccariello, ContentGuard
Peter Schirling, IBM
Xin Wang, ContentGuard

While I am sure all the members of the TC will try to develop a standard
that represents the interests of everyone affected by the DRM standard, I
fail to see any representation of the academic, library or other
communities. That is not to imply any fault on the part of the TC or
OASIS, as a community academics have tended to absent themselves from such
discussions.

The interests of the academic community in issues such as "fair use" and
allowing free (or at least non-commercial) use of texts and research will
not be well served by a standard that protects the commercial rights in
the "Lion King" and similar artifacts. Our requirements are different and
any standard for DRM should not attempt a one size fits all solution. I am
sure that the TC would welcome academic input that would lead to a more
nuanced standard that meets a wide range of needs, one of the hallmarks of
a successful standard.

Note that a DRM standard will eventually find its way into
hardware/software and it will be too late to complain at that point that
it does not meet the needs of the academic community.

Please forward Robin's note (and my comments if you think appropriate) to
anyone you know who is interested in "fair use" or more generally access
to academic materials, since a DRM standard will deeply affect both
issues.

Patrick Durusau
Director of Research and Development
Society of Biblical Literature
pdurusau@emory.edu

***

>          Date: Mon, 01 Jul 2002 06:40:20 +0100
>          From: Robin Cover <robin@isogen.com>
>          Subject: Request for DRM Requirements
>
>  An OASIS Rights Language Technical Committee [1] has been
>  established to "define the industry standard for a rights
>  language" that would govern many application domains,
>  including (potentially) digital libraries and archive
>  projects.  The TC has is using an XrML markup language
>  specification from ContentGuard (Xerox and Microsoft)
>  as the basis for defining this common standard.
>
>  Requirements are now being collected as input to the
>  standard's design. A request is hereby made for input
>  from the academic community, (digital) libraries,
>  museums, archive centers [etc], including persons
>  affiliated with ALA or RLG.  The relevant OASIS
>  subcommittee will collect requirements through
>  August 7, 2002.
>
>  Current legislative proposals for incorporating
>  DRM technology and usage policies into computer
>  hardware, operating system software, and applications
>  level software raise the stakes for the humanities
>  community, especially as traditional notions of fair
>  use are being challenged as too burdensome to
>  implement in DRM systems.  The Creative Commons
>  Project [2] exemplifies the attempt of one group
>  to counter this trend, but the effects of a
>  government-mandated universal DRM technology are
>  of concern to a growing number of technologists [3].
>
>  Any interested party having access to DRM specifications
>  or implementations, or otherwise motivated to help
>  in the submission of 'rights management' requirements for
>  humanities computing applications is invited to send email
>  expressing this interest.
>
>  Robin Cover
>  robin@isogen.com
>
>  [1] http://xml.coverpages.org/oasisRightsLanguage.html
>  [2] http://www.creativecommons.org/
>  [3] http://xml.coverpages.org/patents.html

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