Rights Management System
One of the most significant problems in placing intellectual property in a networked environment is that with a few clicks of a mouse thousands of copies of the original work can be distributed at virtually zero marginal cost, and as a result, the owner may be deprived of expected royalty revenue. Since we recognized this problem some years ago and realized that solutions outside of the network itself were unlikely to be either permanent or satisfactory to all parties (e.g., author, owner, publisher, distributor, user), we embarked on the creation of a software subsystem now known as Rights Manager(tm). With our Rights Manager system, we can now control the distribution of digitally formatted intellectual property in a networked environment subject to each stakeholder receiving proper due.
In this project, we use the Rights Manager system with our client server-based content delivery system to manage and control intellectual property distribution for digitally formatted content (e.g., text, images, audio, video, and animations).
Rights Manager is a working system that encodes license agreement information for intellectual property at a server and distributes the intellectual property to authorized users over the Internet or a campuswide intranet along with a Rights Manager-compliant browser. The Rights Manager handles a variety of license agreement types, including public domain, site licensing, controlled simultaneous accesses, and pay-per-use. Rights Manager also manages the functionality available to a client according to the terms of the license agreement; this is accomplished by use of a special browser that enforces the license's terms and that permits or denies client actions such as save, print, display, copy, excerpt, and so on. Access to a particular item of intellectual property, with or without additional functionality, may be made available to the client at no charge, with an overhead charge, or at a royalty plus overhead charge. Rights Manager has been designed to accommodate sufficient flexibility in capturing wide degrees of arbitrariness in charging rules and policies.
The Rights Manager is intended for use by individuals and organizations who function as purveyors of information (publishers, on-line service providers, campus libraries, etc.). The system is capable of managing a wide variety of agreements from an unlimited number of content providers. Rights Manager also permits customization of licensing terms so that individual users or user classes may be defined and given unique access privileges to restricted sets of materials. A relatively common example of this customization for CWRU would be an agreement to provide (1) view-only capabilities to an electronic journal accessed by an anonymous user located in the library, (2) display/print/copy access to all on-campus students enrolled in a course for which a digital textbook has been adopted, and (3) full access to faculty for both student and instructor versions of digital editions of supplementary textbook materials.
Fundamental to the implementation of Rights Manager are the creation and maintenance of distribution rights, permissions, and license agreement databases.
These databases express the terms and conditions under which the content purveyor distributes materials to its end users. Relevant features of Rights Manager include:
• a high degree of granularity, which may be below the level of a paragraph, for publisher-defined content
• central or distributed management of rights, permissions, and licensing databases
• multiple agreement types (e.g., site licensing, limited site licensing, and payper-use)
• content packaging where rights and permission data are combined with digital format content elements for managed presentation by Web browser plug-in modules or helper applications
Rights Manager maintains a comprehensive set of distribution rights, permissions, and charging information. The premise of Rights Manager is that each publication may be viewed as a compound document. A publication under this definition consists of one or more content elements and media types; each element may be individually managed, as may be required, for instance, in an anthology.
Individual content elements may be defined as broadly or narrowly as required (i.e., the granularity of the elements is defined by the publisher and may go below the level of a paragraph of content for text); however, for overall efficiency, each content element should represent a significant and measurable unit of material. Figures, tables, illustrations, and text sections may reasonably be defined as individual content elements and be treated uniquely according to each license agreement.
To manage the distribution of complete publications or individual content elements, two additional licensing metaphors are implemented. The first of these, a Collection Agreement, is used to specify an agreement between a purveyor and its supplier (e.g., a primary or secondary publisher); this agreement takes the form of a list of publications distributed by the purveyor and the terms and conditions under which these publications may be issued to end users (one or more Collection Agreements may be defined and simultaneously managed between the purveyor and a customer).
The second abstraction, a Master Agreement, is used to broadly define the rules and conditions that apply to all Collection Agreements between the purveyor and its content supplier. Only one Master Agreement may be defined between the supplier and the institutional customer. In practice, Rights Manager assumes that the purveyor will enter into licensing agreements with its suppliers for the delivery of digitally formatted content. At the time the first license agreement is executed between a supplier and a purveyor, one or more entries are made into the purveyor's Rights Manager databases to define the Master and Collection Agreements. Optionally, Publication and/or Content-Element usage rules may also be
defined. Licensed materials may be distributed from the purveyor's site (or perhaps by an authorized service provider); both the content and associated licensing rules are transferred by the supplier to the purveyor for distributed license and content management.
Depending on the selected delivery option, individual end users (e.g., faculty members, students, or library patrons) may access either a remote server or a local institutional repository to search and request delivery of licensed publications. Depending on the agreement(s) between the owner and the purveyor, individual users are assigned access rights and permissions that may be based on individual user IDs, network addresses, or both.
Network or Internet Protocol addresses are used to limit distribution by physical location (e.g., to users accessing the materials from a library, a computer lab, or a local workstation). User identification may be exploited to create limited sitelicensing models or individual user agreements (e.g., distributing publications only to students enrolled in Chemistry 432 or, perhaps, to a specific faculty member).
At each of the four levels (Master Agreement, Collection Agreement, Publication, and Content-Element), access rules and usage privileges may be defined. In general, the access and usage permissions rules are broadly defined at the Master and Collection Agreement level and are refined or restricted at the Publication and Content-Element levels. For example, a Master or Collection Agreement rule could be defined to specify that by default all licensed text elements may be printed at a some fixed cost, say 10¢ per page; however, high value or core text sections may be individually identified using Publication or Content-Element override rules and assessed higher charges, say 20¢ per page.
When a request for delivery of materials is received, the content rules are evaluated in a bottom-up manner (e.g., content element rules are evaluated before publication rules, which are, in turn, evaluated before license agreement rules, etc.). Access and usage privileges are resolved when the system first recognizes a match between the requester's user ID (or user category) and/or the network address and the permission rules governing the content. Access to the content is only granted when an applicable set of rules specifically granting access permission to the end user is found; in the case where two or more rules permit access, the rules most favorable to the end user are selected. Under this approach, site licenses, limited site licenses, individual licensing, and pay-per-use may be simultaneously specified and managed.
The following use of the Rights Manager rules databases is recommended as an initial guideline for Rights Manager implementation:
1. Use Master Agreement rules to define the publishing holding company or imprint, the agreement's term (beginning and ending dates), and the general "fair use" guidelines negotiated between a supplier and the purveyor. Because of the current controversy over the definition of "fair use," Rights
Manager does not rely on preprogrammed definitions; rather, the supplier and purveyor may negotiate this definition and create rules as needed. This approach permits fair use definitions to be redefined in response to new standards or regulatory definitions without requiring modifications to Rights Manager itself.
2. Use Collection Agreement rules to define the term (beginning and ending dates) for specific licensing agreements between the supplier and the purveyor. General access and permission rules by user ID, user category, network address, and media type would be assigned at this level.
3. Use Publication rules to impose any user ID or user category-specific rules (e.g., permissions for students enrolled in a course for which this publication has been selected as the adopted textbook) or to impose exceptions based on the publication's value.
4. Use Content-Element rules to grant specific end users or user categories access to materials (e.g., define content elements that are supplementary teaching aids for the instructor) or to impose exceptions based on media type or the value of content elements.
The Rights Manager system does not mandate that licensing agreements exploit user IDs; however, maximum content protection and flexibility in license agreement specification is achieved when this feature is used. Given that many institutions or consortium members may not have implemented a robust user authentication system, alternative approaches to uniquely identifying individual users must be considered. While there are a variety of ways to address this issue, it is suggested that personal identification numbers (PINs), assigned by the supplier and distributed by trusted institutional agents at the purveyor's site (e.g., instructors, librarians, bookstore employees, or departmental assistants) or embedded within the content, be used as the basis for establishing user IDs and passwords. Using this approach, valid users may enter into registration dialogues to automatically assign user IDs and passwords in response to a valid PIN "challenge."
While Rights Manager is designed to address all types of multimedia rights, permissions, and licensing issues, the current implementation has focused on distribution of traditional print publication media (text and images). Extensions to Rights Manager to address the distribution of full multimedia, including streaming audio and video, are being developed at CWRU.
The key to understanding our approach to intellectual property management is that we expect that each scholarly work will be disseminated according to a comprehensive contractual agreement. Publishers may use master agreements to cover a set of titles. Further, we do not expect that there will be only one interpretation of concepts such as fair use, and our Rights Manager system makes provision for arbitrarily different operational definitions of fair use, so that specific contractual agreements can be "enforced" within the delivery system.