Managing Rights Management

Synchronous Health and Steiner Blockchain and DRM Patent Applications

Today's Spotlight Applications continue our theme of blockchain (distributed ledger) and digital rights management broadly construed. Assigned to Synchronous Health, the first application discloses techniques for predictive modeling and adjustment of behavioral health. Assigned to the pro se inventor Steiner, the second application discloses a portable electronic device for authentication... Read more →

Yahoo and Microsoft DRM Patent Applications

On Thursdays the USPTO publishes new pending patent applications. Today's Spotlight Applications concern aspects of DRM and copyright protection. Assigned to Yahoo!, the first application discloses techniques for detecting the source of media content with application to business rules. Assigned to Microsoft, the second application discloses an educational content presentation... Read more →

Will DRM Help E-Textbook Publishers?

DRM may help, at least for a while. That's the implication of Randall Stross' NYTimes article on evolving business models for college textbooks. The textbook publishers have abundantly good reasons to promote e-books. When Cengage sells an e-book version of “Organic Chemistry” directly to students, for $109.99, it not only... Read more →

A Textbook Case of Piracy

The Boston Globe reports that textbook piracy is becoming rampant. "We think it's a significant problem," said William Sampson, manager of infringement and antipiracy at Cengage Learning Inc., a reference book publisher in Farmington Hills, Mich. Sampson said that in any given month, 200 to 300 of the company's titles... Read more →

Textbooks Shared On BitTorrent

[tip o' the hat to Farber's IP list]. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that the Association of American Publishers (AAP) is increasingly concerned about the use P2P BitTorrent to share textbooks. One Web site, called Textbook Torrents, promises more than 5,000 textbooks for download in PDF format, complete with... Read more →

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 pilot project, which will see textbooks sold in downloadable form at 10 university bookstores this fall, went into operation earlier this week. Under the... Read more →

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... Read more →

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... Read more →

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... Read more →

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... Read more →

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... Read more →