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Re: Report Suggests U.K. Consider Regulating Licensed Content

There is a misunderstanding here about DRM. Perforce every publication has some Digital Rights Management status/enablement. All publishers necessarily use Digital Rights Management, although in some cases their DRM position may just be a tight verbal statement of prohibition "All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form dadidadida......without prior permission in wiriting.".

Sometimes DRM is partly 'technological' -- so with this generation of online systems most, but not all, publishers enable users to cut and paste elements of text (or even whole publications) from their system and reuse those elements (even whole texts) in 'offline' systems or private electronic notes. But there are online systems which do NOT enable the user to cut and paste elements of text :-- for example the Google Book Search system which is in some technical respects a surprisingly restrictive/unpermissive system of DRM. This restrictiveness is nothing to do with what Google SAY that users can/cannot do with the texts and with the Google system. Its a blunt limitation of that system.

DRM is surely always a mixture of legal and technological possibilities/enablements and the issue that rights holders need to address is that as the technological enablements become a lot easier the traditional barriers may no longer be sensible places to draw the line.

Scholarship which uses 'multimedia' elements finds this out at pretty much the same time as YouTube crashes onto the scene. When the techology enables Professors and teenagers to upload videos easily, they will do so; and Deans, parents and lawyers may find it hard to stop them. Pointless to try outright bans but fruitful to identify 'permitted uses' which is what rightly concerns the British Academy.

Adam Hodgkin

On 10/16/06, Anthony Watkinson <anthony.watkinson@btopenworld.com> wrote:

I was present at the launch of this report. The British Academy's approach was to ask fellows what problems they had encountered using copyrighted content in their own work (I simplify but this was the gist of it). They did consult a group concerned with intellectual property issues. They did not however consult any publishers or any librarians.

It looks as if the sort of problems distinguished academic authors have in getting permissions are entirely or almost entirely with the music industry and picture libraries - see the examples in the text. The links between this sort of evidence and the recommendations is not (to my mind) at all clear and the chairman of the group preparing this report admitted that there is a lot of work to be done before any systematic view is reached. In particular I was puzzled about the concerns over digital rights management, an enemy which is often invoked. I do not know of any publisher of scholarly books or primary scholarly journals which implements digital rights management. Does anyone on this list know of instances? I imagine such implementation would cost quite a bit

Anthony Watkinson

----- Original Message -----
From: "Hamaker, Charles" <cahamake@email.uncc.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Friday, October 13, 2006 9:21 PM
Subject: Report Suggests U.K. Consider Regulating Licensed Content

Report Suggests U.K. Consider Regulating Licensed Content
http://www.libraryjournal.com/clear/CA6380712.html?nid=2673#news1

The British Academy, a national body for the advancement of
humanities and social sciences, has released an eye-opening
report, sponsored by the European Commission, suggesting the
application of copyright law in the United Kingdom may be
inhibiting the work of scholars and offering ten
"recommendations" for redress, including possible government
regulation of licensing deals. Among the report's conclusions:
copyright exemptions such as "fair dealing" (fair use) should
"normally be sufficient for academic and scholarly use," but that
"problems lie in narrow interpretation," both by rights holders
and by publishers; that copyright holders, as a result of the
development of new media, "are more aggressive in seeking to
maximize revenue from the rights, even if the legal basis of
their claims is weak;" and that there are "well-founded" concerns
that new database rights and the development of digital rights
management systems (DRM) "may enable rights holders to circumvent
the effects of the copyright exemptions designed to facilitate
research and scholarship."

The report, Copyright and Research in the Humanities and Social
Sciences: A British Academy Review was composed by a working
group of eight members, appointed by the British Academy and
drawn from a range of subjects in the humanities and social
sciences along with help from the Centre for the Study of
Intellectual and Technology Property Law at the University of
Edinburgh.

****