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

I think we need to distinguish between TPM - technical protection measures - which actually attach some kind of 'enforcement' of the publisher's terms and conditions to the object, and DRM - digital rights management. The very simplest TPM, which every publisher who charges for content likely employs, is access control which only allows in those who (or whose library) have paid for access. [A digression - this very basic TPM seems to me to be one which no legal exception should allow a user to override - after all, are you allowed to steal a book from a bookstore because there's a legal exception allowing you to do certain things with it?]

DRM can mean management of digital rights, digital management of rights, or both, which is confusing! As Adam points out, it may simply involve the publisher stating its T&C (in text, or - with projects like ONIX for licensing terms and the forthcoming ACAP for search engines - encoded, but not enforced). In the second sense, services like CCC's RightsLink or commercial equivalents (e.g. iCopyright) provide an outsourced service - I don't actually know of any publishers doing this themselves?

In Europe at least, under the (c) directive rights-holders are supposed to develop 'voluntary measures' to enable legitimate users to override DRM which would otherwise prevent them doing what exceptions allow them to do. Perhaps it's time for rightsholder organisations to get their act together on this?

Sally Morris, Chief Executive
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
Email: sally.morris@alpsp.org
Website: www.alpsp.org

----- Original Message -----
From: "adam hodgkin" <adam.hodgkin@gmail.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, October 17, 2006 2:18 AM
Subject: 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