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NEASIS&T
 

Freedom vs. Control:
Rights Management in the Digital Age

Further Readings

Legislation Related Resources

Primers

Two primers from the Center for Intellectual Property (CIP) available from the University of Maryland University College (UMUC).
CIP's website: http://www.umuc.edu/distance/odell/cip/

  • ©Primer http://www-apps.umuc.edu/primer/enter.php An introductory level interactive tutorial for those unfamiliar with general copyright law that uses illustrative scenarios to discuss issues and includes links to relevant resources.
  • Digital©Primer http://www-apps.umuc.edu/dcprimer/enter.php# deals specifically with copyright issues and problems faced by educational institutions using digital materials for teaching, research and service. Includes information about the TEACH ACT, faculty websites, streaming media, etc. NOTE: Both tutorials require Java and Flash. The Question indexes permit you to find a specific issue that interests you and move around freely within the tutorial.

Articles and Reports

  • Butler, R.P. Copyright Law and Organizing the Internet. Library Trends v. 52 no. 2 (Fall 2003) p. 307-17. Looks at US intellectual property law and its impact on libraries as providers to internet access.

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  • Coyle, Karen. Rights Expression Languages, a Report for the Library of Congress, February, 2004.
    Available at http://www.loc.gov/standards/relreport.pdf This whitepaper defines and analyzes a representative sample of Rights Expression Languages or "RELs" from a simple expression of fair use to a more complex machine-actionable expression used in systems environments. [1 December 2004]

  • Coyle, Karen, The Rights in Digital Rights Management. D-Lib Magazine, September 2004, Volume 10 Number 9. Available: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september04/coyle/09coyle.html Brief article exploring the meaning and interpretation of "rights" in the digital environment and nice mini-primer for the Rights Expression Languages whitepaper [see above] Coyle prepared for the Library of Congress earlier this year. Includes discussion of a "taxonomy of rights" with illustrations. [1 December 2004]

  • Davis, Denise M. and Tim Lafferty, Digital Rights Management: Implications for libraries The Bottom Line. 15.1 (2002): 18-23. Outlines and defines DRM and implications for libraries.

  • Kelley, Kimberly B., Intellectual Property, Ownership and Digital Course Materials: A Study of Intellectual Property Policies at Two and Four Year Colleges and Universities. portal: Libraries and the Academy - Volume 2, Number 2, April 2002, pp. 255-266. Results and analysis of study conducted by The Center for Intellectual Property(CIP) at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC). The study reviewed the IP policies of seventy-nine two- and four-year academic institutions to identify their copyright ownership policies for digital course materials. Also looks at the distribution of copyright ownership rights between the faculty and their institutions and attempts to identify "best practices" in the field.

  • May, Christopher, Digital rights management and the breakdown of social norms. First Monday; 8 (11) Nov 2003. Available: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_11/may/index.htmlAuthor tackles the politics of DRM. [1 December 2004]

  • Pike, G.H. "To link or not to link.", Information Today v. 19 no. 6 (June 2002) p. 20-1, 47 Looks at interplay between legal issues and hyperlinks on the web. Also discusses copyrighting web content and "deeplinking" on commercial sites.

  • Samuelson, Pamela. DRM {and, or, vs.} the law. SPECIAL ISSUE: Digital rights management and fair use by design. Communications of the ACM, Volume 46, Number 4 (2003), Pages 41-45. Though published prior to Coyle's "Rights in DRM" article listed above, fits in nicely with the theme in a discussion of what Samuelson sees as the goal of DRM: " not to prevent copyright infringement but to change consumer expectations about what they are entitled to do with digital content."

  • Vaidhyanathan, Siva, The State of Copyright Activism. First Monday, 9 (4) Apr 2004.
    Available: http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_4/siva/index.html. Vaidhyanathan looks at the growing public discourse and interest in U.S. copyright issues in recent years and considers a potential future state of copyright concerns. [1 December 2004]

Other

  • Crawford, Walt. Cites & Insights, Crawford at Large. ISSN 1534-0937, 2000 - . Available: http://cites.boisestate.edu/ See Volume 4, Number 8 for special Copyright issue. For those who despite knowing how to use Thomas.Gov to find Bills and such, still enjoy reading featurized annotated citations and commentary on currents in our field. That's right, it's not a blog, it's a ZINE!! Crawford touches on any number of topics each month, expect to add this to your normal rotation of things to read to keep current. RSS feed: http://cical.blogspot.com/atom.xml
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  • The EDUCAUSE Evolving Technologies Committee, Surveying the Digital Landscape: Evolving Technologies 2004. Not specifically related to program topic, but important in general given we are all working with various technologies despite the differences in the user groups we service. A look at six evolving technologies in 2004: http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/erm0464.pdf

Books

  • Lessig, Lawrence. Free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity, New York : Penguin Press, 2004. Free download via Creative Commons licensing: http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/

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  • Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The anarchist in the library: how the clash between freedom and control is hacking the real world and crashing the system. New York : Basic Books, 2004

Beatrice Pulliam - bpulliam@providence.edu
13 December 2004