Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
17.8 Digital Rights Management Details
The role of the Digital Rights Management module inside the CASPAR archi-
tecture is basically that of defining and registering provenance information on a
digital work to derive and retrieve right holding information and intellectual prop-
erty rights. Such rights are interpreted differently depending on the country and on
the legal framework, i.e. the set of laws and regulations which refer to digital rights.
Changes in the legal framework can occur, so the CASPAR system provides services
to keep up-to-dated laws and regulations and to handle the consequences of such
changes in order to guarantee the preservation of IPR information and of the way to
interpret it.
The primary goal is to allow users of tomorrow to access and use the copyrighted
works of today, complying with all the actual existing restrictions, as well as to
provide to right holders the guarantee of protecting their rights.
The DRM addresses in particular:
•
identification and registration of provenance information on digital works;
•
derivation and preservation of ownership rights and individual permissions
attached to Data Objects, possibly defined a long time before their dissemination;
•
management of changes in copyright laws and regulations, which apply to
disseminated Data Objects, depending on the distribution country.
CASPAR DRM implementation includes also the definition of a Digital Rights
Ontology (DRO), which is aimed at modelling the entities in the Copyright
domain and at providing a formal dictionary to describe intellectual property rights
ownership.
In the long term, it is quite difficult to identify and clear all the existing rights,
because the evolution in legislation and international agreements, as well as relevant
events related to the history of single items may influence the status of things. This
is what makes the environment for digital rights management particularly difficult
for long term preservation. Both the exclusive ownership rights and the permissions
to use intellectual property are subject to change in time. Changes in the legislation
(either locally or through international agreements) might affect the duration of the
copyright, the type of works that are protected, the type of actions that are restricted,
etc. But they also impact the permissions, as new rules may be introduced that autho-
rise or disallow certain uses of intellectual property materials. Moreover there are
other elements that influence the existing rights, namely those related to each partic-
ular work. It is, for instance, possible that the original rights holder transfers some of
his exclusive ownership rights to another person, or he could decide to put his crea-
tion under Public Domain, or still keep the ownership rights but release the work
under a more or less permissive license model. Finally the death of an author is
another event that influences the expiration date of the ownership right, after which
date no permission is needed to use his/her creation. The DRO also aims at taking
into consideration these long term preservation issues by identifying the impact of
changes in multi-national legal framework on the rights on digital holdings.
