16.102 call for input on digital rights management

From: Humanist Discussion Group (by way of Willard McCarty (w.mccarty@btinternet.com)
Date: Mon Jul 01 2002 - 01:42:42 EDT

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                   Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 102.
           Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   <http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
                  <http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>

             Date: Mon, 01 Jul 2002 06:40:20 +0100
             From: Robin Cover <robin@isogen.com>
             Subject: Request for DRM Requirements

    An OASIS Rights Language Technical Committee [1] has been
    established to "define the industry standard for a rights
    language" that would govern many application domains,
    including (potentially) digital libraries and archive
    projects. The TC has is using an XrML markup language
    specification from ContentGuard (Xerox and Microsoft)
    as the basis for defining this common standard.

    Requirements are now being collected as input to the
    standard's design. A request is hereby made for input
    from the academic community, (digital) libraries,
    museums, archive centers [etc], including persons
    affiliated with ALA or RLG. The relevant OASIS
    subcommittee will collect requirements through
    August 7, 2002.

    Current legislative proposals for incorporating
    DRM technology and usage policies into computer
    hardware, operating system software, and applications
    level software raise the stakes for the humanities
    community, especially as traditional notions of fair
    use are being challenged as too burdensome to
    implement in DRM systems. The Creative Commons
    Project [2] exemplifies the attempt of one group
    to counter this trend, but the effects of a
    government-mandated universal DRM technology are
    of concern to a growing number of technologists [3].

    Any interested party having access to DRM specifications
    or implementations, or otherwise motivated to help
    in the submission of 'rights management' requirements for
    humanities computing applications is invited to send email
    expressing this interest.

    Robin Cover
    robin@isogen.com

    [1] http://xml.coverpages.org/oasisRightsLanguage.html
    [2] http://www.creativecommons.org/
    [3] http://xml.coverpages.org/patents.html



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