   
Universal Availability of Publications Core Programme
Special Interest Group Meeting and Workshop
Brussels, 9 September 1998
The primary object of the COPEARMS Project is to assist the so-called 'vertical projects' concerned with IPR (Intellectual Property Rights) management. A related objective is to carry out, with the vertical projects, a standardisation process that is necessary to permit ERMS (Electronic Rights Management Systems) interoperability. Towards this end a series of SIGs (Special Interest Group Meetings) have been held throughout Europe. The first SIG was held in London in April 1996 and attracted delegates mainly from the UK, Belgium and France. This was followed by a SIG held in Barcelona in September 1996 with the aim of attracting delegates from Spain, Portugal and Southern France. Last year a joint SIG with the IMPRIMATUR Project was held in Florence as part of the EVA Conference which took place in March. The fourth SIG was planned and held in Athens to coincide with the IFRRO (International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations) AGM to encourage members of rights organisations to attend. This aim succeeded and attracted delegates from not only many countries within Europe but also from Australia, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa, USA and Zimbabwe. This fifth and final SIG attracted delegates from Belgium, China, The Netherlands and the UK.
Aims of the Special Interest Group Meeting
One of the aims of the Project is to promote the concept of interoperable rights management to the entire information world and it is important during the life of the Project to keep aware of the current problems and concerns in the whole area of electronic rights management. The COPEARMS partners gave presentations about general ERMS issues (including security and legal concerns); the assistance that can be provided by the COPEARMS Consortium; and ERMS implementation. Delegates were also invited to speak about any projects with which they are involved.
Delegates were encouraged to ask questions after each presentation and the meeting finished with a general question and answer session, giving delegates an opportunity to debate any issues concerning the role of ERMS. The views expressed at the meeting will be passed (anonymously) to the IMPRIMATUR Project, another Esprit project with which COPEARMS has been closely working, to form part of the consensus building process.
Pauline Connolly
September 1998
Speakers Presentations
Copies of the speakers' papers are available separately from ifla@bl.uk
Legal aspects of Electronic Rights Management Systems (ERMS) - Séverine Dusollier
Identifiers requirements - Jean-Christophe Lardinois
Security issues - Gérard Eizenberg
The COPEARMS experience - Edmond Kouka
The COPEARMS offer - Dominique Spaey
Contract services - Richard Carr
Question & Answer Session
Why SEDODEL
Summary of papers and discussions
The day began with an introduction to the aims of the SIG by Judy Watkins. The participants then introduced themselves and briefly stated their interest in electronic rights management systems and their reasons for attending the SIG. The delegates were from publishers, publishers' associations and university libraries. Other projects were also represented.
Séverine Dusollier from CRID spoke about the legal issues of ERMS stressing that the law is very important if technology is able to provide a solution for the protection of rights holders. She recommended that, when appropriate protection is in place, tools that facilitate circumvention of these mechanisms should be banned.
One of the delegates commented that the Draft Copyright Directive is for rights owners and the measures could prohibit access as well as copying and reproducing. She felt that the Directive produced a negative picture overall with no real legal protection against circumvention. Séverine replied that she felt it is maybe too early to comment as the protection measures are not yet clear.
When asked how it was possible to ensure that students have access to all the material they need she replied that technology providers, even if they are rights owners, are not usually reluctant about exceptions.
Another problem mentioned was privacy - if personal data needs to be given before access is allowed it is infringing privacy rights, especially if the information is provided to other countries where privacy legislation is not as strict. Séverine agreed that, so far, there was no solution to this problem.
Another delegate considered the legislation and directives to be too strict and felt that, within the European Union, they should be reviewed on a regular basis to change with technology. Séverine disagreed and did not feel that it was a good solution to link legal issues with technology changes.
Further discussion followed about whether the law should keep abreast of rapidly evolving technology and differing views were expressed.
Jean-Christophe Lardinois, also from CRID, began his presentation about identifiers by informing the delegates that a discussion paper had been released by the DOI (Digital Object Identifier) Foundation on 17 August 1998 and full details are on the Web site at http://www.doi.org
When asked why there are so many different identifiers for literary works Jean-Christophe replied that he wasn't sure. One suggestion made was that it could be because collecting societies are different in each country.
Comments were made emphasising the importance of European Publishers' Associations. Many have joined the DOI Foundation and some are already testing DOIs.
What happens with multimedia material - does each format have a separate identifier? Jean-Christophe replied that it was important for each part to be kept separately identified in order that any part of the work cannot be taken and reproduced. The complete work will have one identifier with sub-identifiers for each individual part.
A delegate commented that the ALCS (Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society) is using DOIs to identify authors - they are not just a publishers' initiative. See the Web site at http://www.alcs.co.uk. DOIs are only being tested at this stage but at least publishers and authors are 'talking'.
Gérard Eizenberg from ONERA followed with a presentation of the security issues of ERMS. He stressed the importance of evaluation criteria profiles and also felt that it was important in organisations such as libraries to protect the integrity of material no longer within the scope of copyright legislation.
There was some debate about whether ERMS is relevant to electronic commerce, which remained unresolved.
Gérard was asked about over-watermarking attack and gave a detailed explanation using diagrams. He confirmed that it would be difficult for the owner of the rights to the original watermarked document to prove that he was the owner of the over-watermarked document. He informed the delegates that there were a series of security conferences being held in Brussels the following week, including a paper on watermarking.
Edmond Kouka from EURITIS introduced himself as the technology provider for the COPEARMS Project and spoke of the lessons learned from ERMS technical assistance given to vertical projects.
As the meeting was running late and lunch had already been delayed for 30 minutes Judy asked the delegates to save any questions until the question and answer session later in the day.
The first presentation after lunch was by Richard Carr from Level 7 on ERMS Contract Service. He talked about CORBA and ERMS interoperability and explained in detail the implementation scenario, a skeleton of which is already working.
The offer set specifying AM (morning) only provoked some debate as to what constituted AM on the Internet. Richard explained that the system's knowledge of the user would define when AM is.
Dominique Spaey from Bureau van Dijk, co-ordinating partner of the Project, followed with presentation of COPEARMS services and outlined the answers to: Who needs COPEARMS? How does COPEARMS intervene? What is COPEARMS added value? Who are the COPEARMS targeted customers? What does COPEARMS offer? He then presented the COPEARMS package on offer. It is intended that the offer will be put on the Web site, together with a questionnaire for interested parties to complete.
Judy pointed out that the Web site is currently being prepared and will be found at http://www.ifla.org/VI/2/p5/index.htm
The question and answer session followed, a summary of which is included later in the proceedings.
Judy Watkins and Edmond Kouka presented SEDODEL (SEcure DOcument DELivery for Blind and Partially Sighted People) http://www.arttic.com/projects/sedodel/, a project sponsored by the European Commission under thr TIDE Programme. It commenced on 1 April 1998 and will run for 18 months. Judy handed out brochures and gave a brief outline of the main problems which SEDODEL is hoping to address, such as copyright, integrity issues and interoperability issues. Edmond followed and spoke about the technical issues involved, demonstrating the architecture for the system integration using CopySmart technology.
A delegate questioned the need for a new system as it would seem that COPEARMS could be used, each user having their own profile. Judy answered that copyright legislation is prohibitive for visually impaired people. At the moment permission is needed from content providers every time material is converted to an alternate format in order that visually impaired people have the same access as normally sighted people. The main obstacle is how to convince content providers that they will not lose their market if SEDODEL makes material accessible to visually impaired people. (One of the other partners in the SEDODEL Project has given a more detailed description of the need for SEDODEL and this has been reproduced, with his permission, later in the proceedings.)
It was agreed that there are many legal issues and COPEARMS services could be offered to SEDODEL.
Judy pointed out that the draft directive on copyright issues in the information society does not give much to the whole of the print-disabled population. She produced a slide which outlined the draft proposed alternative.
Andrew Sutton, Project Manager of the RITE (Radical Improvements To Efficiency through access to low cost multimedia systems) Consortium, gave a short presentation of the RITE Project. Various parts of the music industry communicate with each other in many ways and the effectiveness of that communication can significantly affect the efficiency and profitability of the companies concerned. The Project seeks to improvethese communications by providing efficient and seamless access to information and easy to use exchange of views and documents.
Judy closed the meeting by thanking the delegates for attending, the speakers for their presentations and Pauline for her part in the organisation.
Pauline Connolly,
September 1998
Question & Answer Session
- Question
- Is there a link between COPEARMS and IMPRIMATUR?
- Answer
- The projects have worked closely together and are committed to the consensus building process. They aim to set a common demo - one part to cover COPEARMS services, another part to cover IMPRIMATUR technology. CRID has had a lot of co-operationwith the legal partner of IMPRIMATUR and is still collaborating regarding the legal position of ERMS.
- Question
- Publishers already have DOIs - how can COPEARMS help?
- Answer
- COPEARMS services will implement detailed management of rights and payments associated with each piece of information. If the publisher has already implemented DOI it will be easier to implement the model into the system. It can also be used for management of statistics usage.
- Question
- The CopySmart Project technology is dependent on the use of smartcards. Would every workstation have a separate smartcard reader?
- Answer
- New technology has produced several new types of smartcard readers - some are embedded into the keyboard or into the floppy disk station.
- Question
- Why have the presentations not been demonstrated with an Internet link?
- Answer
- To keep the costs of the meeting as low as possible. It is extremely expensive to hire an Internet link in a hotel.
- Question
- Before attending the meeting had anyone had any experience of using an ERMS e.g. IBM Cryptolope?
- Answer
- On some DOI sites the system, incorporating ERMS, can be tested.
- Question
- Does the identifier include any rating of the quality of the material?
- Answer
- All this information can be included in the metadata attached to the identifier. It is the role of the publishers to attach this information in just the same way that printed scientific journals have different ratings.
- Question
- One of the problems is that you could pay for an article and then find that is either not relevant or of inferior quality. How is this overcome?
- Answer
- Some sites have endorsements giving this kind of information. ERMS can accommodate metadata, which can contain arbitrary information and can easily be stored. PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection) is one example of a metadata model. [PICS is an infrastructure for associating labels (metadata) with internet resources. The initial goal of this infrastructure, content filtering, is now evolving to address the broader issues of content selection including richer resource descriptive schemes, organisational management, discovery and retrieval, intellectual property rights and privacy protection tasks - see the Web site at http://www.w3.org/PICS/NG/
Pauline Connolly
September 1998
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