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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