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

["Sally Morris \(Chief Executive\)" <sally.morris@alpsp.org>]

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