Managing Rights Management

eTextBooks Redux

Market forces seems to be having some effect on the specifics of the rules associated with eTextbooks, this according to John Borland's CNet blogicle.  Snippets:

The eTextbook BruHaha And Business Sin 4

A few days ago, I noted that a number of publishers, booksellers,  and colleges were marketing DRM-protected textbooks. The debate / commentary continues, including articles on Tom's Hardware site, ZDNet and this  summary from CNET.

My own view is that DRMed eBooks are just fine. The problem is the business model(s). The publishers seem to be committing one of management consultant Peter Drucker's (a personal hero) Five Deadly Business Sins, namely, slaughtering tomorrow's opportunities on the alter of yesterday.

DRMed College Textbooks

[tip o' the hat to Dave Farber's IP list.] DigitalTextbooks.net has announced a program involving five  publishers and apparently  several collages beginning this Fall to distribute college textbooks in Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format. Supported interactive features include document searching, highlighting, underlining, note taking, and in some cases, read-out-loud capability.

I suspect that it will take a while to figure out a set of DRM restrictions that balances market demand and convenience  with publishers' rights and revenue. According to one source, the the program is being launched with the following restrictions:
 

Students put colleges in copyright war

The STLToday.com site (St. Louis Post Dispatch) has a long story written by Joel Currier on copyright issues on campus. Snippets:

Universities are finding themselves trapped at the center of a bitter battle over bandwidth - caught between the entertainment industry's crusade to end  copyright piracy and tech-savvy students' casual sharing of songs and movies.  

The competing interests converged at a Digital Expo at Washington University, bringing together representatives from entertainment and technology with seven companies that market "peer-to-peer" file-sharing networks to colleges. The goal of the vendor fair and panel discussion Thursday night was to educate  students about legal alternatives to trading copyrighted materials.

Legal Battle Brews Over Texts on Electronic Reserve

A posting on Dave Farber's "Interesting Persons" list of an article published in the Chronicle of Higher Education indicates that trouble is brewing between publishers and university libraries.  Snippets:

Publishers are objecting to an electronic reserve system at the
University of California in which libraries scan portions of books and
journals and make them available free online to students.

Legacy DRM

Campus Technology magazine has an article by Terry Calhoun of the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP, www.scup.org) that addresses challenges facing universities in digitizing some of their print holdings and putting the digital versions online. The context is the December 14, 2004 Google announcement regarding cooperation with universities and libraries to make portions of their collections available online. In case you missed the announcement, salient excerpts are at the end of this piece.

With universities providing leadership on putting works online, the question raised in the Calhoun article is this:

We’ll all have to keep in mind that the DRM we want is not the “management of digital rights,” but rather the “digital management of rights.” We’ll have to be careful not to lose sight of the human perspective and not to burden the digitized content of printed media with technological gunk that breaks down and becomes useless to users, or that might make the digital versions unreadable by slightly more advanced technologies. [emphasis added]

If I understand the distinction Calhoun is making, it's between actively managing rights relating to digital objects, content, files, etc. as opposed to using technology to manage rights whether they pertain to digital content or not.  Examples of the first are DRM technologies used by Apple, Microsoft, Real, and other companies covered on this blog. Examples of the second include the kind of rights and permissions managed by Copyright Clearance Center regarding reprints, for example. CCC makes active use of computing resources to manage these rights.

DRM entails two parts: the association of rights with digital content and the use of technologies to enforce those rights. It's hard to imaging the former without the latter. The honor system cannot be relied on. And Calhoun is right to point out that rights apply to content not (yet) in digital form.

Calhoun is dead on regarding technological obsolescence. What if I have an encrypted file whose source was one of the DRM-based services around just a few years ago at the turn of this century. The odds are great that I can no longer access content the I own.

A facile response is, tough; technology marches on; can't hold back progress. However, as the use of DRM technologies becomes more pervasive, legacy DRM technologies will become a problem, just like legacy applications and media format--remember 7 track tapes, 800 bpi tapes--in the Enterprise space. It's not at all clear to this observer that DRM vendors are yet sufficiently concerned about DRM obsolescence and the potential for orphaned protected content that cannot be accessed.

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