MIT 6.805/STS085: Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier
in coordination with
Harvard Law School: Internet and Society
Fall Semester, 1999

Week 7, Oct. 18 - 22:
Digital rights architectures and trusted systems

Overview

Copyright strives for a balance that permits authors to profit from their works, while still allowing the public to have access to them and build upon them. For example, fair use provisions allow libraries and educational institutions to do limited copying. More significantly, much of what might technically be copyright infringement by private citizens no one really cares about, because there is no way to casually print or distribute large numbers of copies, and making and sharing small numbers of copies generally has no economic consequence.

The Internet upsets this balance, because it trivializes the task of copying digital information and making it available worldwide. Some people argue that this will make copyright less important in scheme of things, that cyberspace will change the nature of intellectual property fundamentally, so that "value" will derive more from personal service and rapid access to relevant information than with information per se.

Another view looks to digital rights management technologies as a way to salvage copyright: If the basic issue is that copying on the Internet is so easy, and so hard to control, then we should implement technologies that make copying difficult, and easy to control. This can be accomplished using techniques of encryption and authentication to ensure that information can be accessed only by intended (licensed) recipients, together with "trusted systems" that will not perform unauthorized copying. A second class of technologies includes digital watermarking, which "indelibly" marks information so that unauthorized copying can be detected, together with Web crawlers that search for unauthorized copies that have been placed on line. As you might expect, there are both utopian and dystopian predictions about these "digital rights management" technologies. Some people view this as engendering an outpouring of creativity and productivity in the information economy, while while others fear that fine-grained, strong control of copying will kill fair use totally.

What impact will the architecture of access controls have on copyright and on our use of information? Will copyright become less important, or will "information piracy" emerge as one of the major bugaboos of the information society? What are the implications of different access control architectures for personal privacy? How can fair use be preserved with architectures of access controls? Alternatively, does the new technology provide better methods of accomplishing the aims of fair use, thus allowing us to abandon traditional fair use ideas?

Readings for Tuesday (be prepared to discuss these in class):

• Charles C. Mann, Who will own your next good idea?, The Atlantic Monthly, September 1998. This is an excellent overview of the challenges to copyright presented by the Web, together with some of the technology (and non-technology) responses. See also the follow-up online rountable discussion among Charles Mann, John Perry Barlow, Larry Lessig, and Mark Stefik.
• Mark Stefik, Trusted Systems, Scientific American, March 1997.
• Richard Stallman, The Right to Read, Communications of the ACM (Volume 40, Number 2), 1997. A science fiction parable about what a world of copyright enforced through trusted systems might be like.

Oral reports for Tuesday:

Topic	Presenter	Resources
Overview of digital watermarking technology	Martin Stiazsny	TBA
Overview of superdistribution technology	Kavita Baball	TBA
Trusted platforms and the TCPA initiatve	Preben Kristensen	TBA

Tuesday class, Oct. 19: Digital rights architectures

Readings for Thursday (be prepared to discuss these in class):

• John Perry Barlow, "The Economy of Ideas". From Wired, Issue 2.03, March 1994. This is a wonderfully written piece, which claims that networks and digital media make traditional notions of intellectual property senseless. Barlow has summarized his position more succinctly as "copyright is dead." Note that this was written in 1994 -- before the prospect of large-scale introduction of digital rights management systems.

• Esther Dyson, Intellectual Value, Wired, Issue 3.07, July 1995. This is an attempt to look at future business opportunities and implications of digital networks, rather than worry about how to fix current law. Dyson argues that intellectual property issues will become less important, because "value" in the information economy will shift from information per se to information-based services.

• Jason Chicola, Dawn Farber, Mami Karatsu, Joseph Liu, Karl Richter, John Tilly, Digital Rights Architectures for Intellectual Property Protection, HTML version, MS Word version. This class paper from last semester provides an excellent overview of the issues.

Thursday class, Oct. 21: Class meets at Harvard Law School

• The impact of trusted systems

Writing assignment: No writing assignment for this week.

• The midterm paper was due on October 19.

Additional resources for this topic

• Pamela Samuelson, The Copyright Grab, Wired, Issue 4.01, January 1996. This article severely criticizes the Clinton administration's White Paper on copyright, as an erosion of fair use.

• 105th Congress, HR 2281: The Digital Millennium Copyright Act. See in particular, Chapter 12, on anticircumvention.

• Tom Bell, Fair Use vs. Fared Use: The Impact Of Automated Rights Management On Copyright's Fair Use Doctrine. 76 N. Carolina L. Rev., 557 (1998). Bell reflects on the copyright regime and argues here that the growth of digital rights management will erode fair use -- but that it could replace this with a system that may actually offer freer access to expressive works.

• Jessica Litman, Revising Copyright Law for the Information Age, 75 Oregon Law Review 19 (1996). Litman argues that digital technology has made "reproduction" untenable as a basis for copyright law.

• Jessica Litman, Copyright Noncompliance (or why we can't "Just say yes" to licensing), 29 New York University Journal of International Law & Policy, 237 (1997). Here Litman emphasizes how Internet has upset the traditional balances in copyright law: "The trouble with the [White Paper's] plan is that the only people who appear to actually believe that the current copyright rules apply as writ to every person on the planet are members of the copyright bar."

• Anne K. Fujita, The Great Internet Panic: How Digitization is Deforming Copyright Law, 2 J. TECH. L. & POL'Y 1, (1996). This is another study of the White Paper and copyright law, with an emphasis on how the Internet is upsetting the traditional balances.

• Pamela Samuelson, Intellectual Property And The Digital Economy: Why The Anti-Circumvention Regulations Need To Be Revised 14 Berkeley Tech. L. J. 519 (1999), (Word format)

• Yochai Benkler, Intellectual Property and the Organization of Information Production (Working Draft, 7/99), (PDF format).

• Mark Sefik, "Letting Loose the Light," in the book Internet Dreams, available from the MIT Press. This lays out the basic idea of trusted systems and rights management.

• XIWT (Cross Industry Working Team), Managing Access to Digital Information: An Approach Based on Digital Objects and Stated Operations, 1997.

• William Y. Arms, Christophe Blanchi, Edward A. Overly, An Architecture for Information in Digital Libraries, D-Lib Magazine, February 1997. This paper describes the infrastructure used for organizing information in the Library of Congress National Digital Libraries Project. It is based on an architecture described by Robert Kahn and Robert Wilensky, in A Framework for Distributed Digital Object Services, Forum on Technology-Based Intellectual Property Management, Corporation for National Research Initiatives, May 1995. You might think about how this infrastructure compares with the use of PICS labels for object identification.

• Northeast Consulting, Digital Rights Management Technologies, 1995. This review, although a bit out of date, is a good overview of the main technical approaches to digital rights management.

• Jian Zhao, Look, It's Not There, Byte, January 1997. A description of digital watermarking technologies. Also see Zhao's Index of Digital Copyright Protection & Digital Watermarking Technology (Several of the links on that page are obsolete.)

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Last modified: October 20 1999, 11:02 PM