Starwave Corporation, the developers of the Web-based ESPNet SportsZone, recently acquired the broadcast rights to all games of the National Basketball Association over the Internet. Through this contract, the NBA endowed Starwave with the rights to transmit basketball game scores electronically. In two additional legal cases, the NBA barred Motorola from electronically transmitting real-time game scores to their pager products and sued America Online for the broadcast of statistics and scores from games in progress (Lazarus 1). The efforts the NBA have put forth in protecting their information online and in electronic form reveal the importance of securing intellectual property in the electronic medium.
When considering the time, costs, and revenues associated with the distribution of information, the security of intellectual property in any medium is of key importance in the legal deliberations of any party presenting such content. While concerned with the distribution of such information, content providers must account for both reputation and liability. The NBA, for example, maintains control over the presentation and authenticity of any score printed in newspaper or broadcast over television. When the presentation medium of intellectual property is computer-based, however, the difficulty of protection of content is dramatically more complex.
When operating in an electronic environment, the problems for information providers arise from the ease at which other parties may modify and manipulate valid information. In electronic form, all information, from images to text to code, proves susceptible to endless reproduction. All parties, from authors and artists to inventors and engineers, are concerned with both the integrity and attribution of ideas and information. The means to secure both information and the actions one may take with such information would prove a boon to all.
Copyright law in its modern context began in 1710 with Britain's adoption of the Statute of Anne. In order to prevent monopoly on the part of publishers, legal protection curtailing the length of a copyright as well as a limit of the rights granted to the owner of the copyright (Timeline 1). As drafted, the United States Constitution in Article I, Section 8 maintains the aim of copyright as the promotion of "the progress of science and useful arts . . . by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive rights to their respective writings and discoveries" (Legislative 8). The United States broadened its coverage to "all works of authorship" in 1909 with a major revision of the U.S. Copyright Act, whereby the government accorded protection for "adequate return" to producers in addition to the protection of the public. Consequently, the U.S. Government's emphasis on the author shaped later intellectual property law in protection of content developers. In 1995, Congress placed a copyright term extension bill under consideration--a bill that would add 20 years to the protection of most all published works and at least 10 years to the protection of unpublished works. In addition, a bill introduced in 1996 would "promote investment and prevent intellectual property piracy with respect to databases" (Timeline 1).
In 1994, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded a software patent for multimedia to the company Compton's New Media. The patent award garnered heated opposition because of the broad definition of multimedia, which could apply to the software of companies unaffiliated with Compton's--software both previously produced as well as all future offerings. More importantly, the opposition revealed several years of prior art in multimedia--works that illustrated the software company did not invent the software method. Perhaps one of the first tests of U.S. intellectual property law in an electronic setting, the Patent and Trademark Office's revocation of Compton's multimedia patent illustrated the failure of the office to recognize the electronic medium as a situation which warranted distinctly different intellectual property methods (Shay 1). With the greater power over replication and modification and with the greater speed in transmission and dissemination, the methods by which law secures intellectual property need review and reformation.
In marked contrast to the recently proposed legislation, the Free Software Foundation has pushed their public license in efforts to "make sure the software is free for all its users" (FSF 1). Known commonly as a copyleft because of its drastic differences from many commercial software licenses, the GNU Public License ironically promotes the progress of science and useful arts in computer science. While the license does provide for the acknowledgment of the author/developer, the primary goal is the distribution of free software- -free in terms of freedom, not price. The Free Software Foundation seeks to "avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary" (FSF 1), and in that avoidance, provide a progressive, collaborative environment in electronic development.
The research, therefore, in seeking to provide the capability of securing intellectual property to the electronic medium of the World Wide Web, maintains an effort to provide an effective environment for both individual work and collaboration. This research aims to balance the protection of individual initiative and the success of collaboration. Given the ease at which computers forward the efforts of collaborative work, such offerings can provide a means to literally promote the progress of science and useful arts.
The primary conflict in solving the problem of digital intellectual property falls between identity and dissemination. In seeking to protect content, developers must decide whether to use identity to secure that content, such as watermarking a document, or to use dissemination to control both the methods and the location of content distribution.
Identity methods likely provide the best security for content given that the security mechanism resides as part of the content itself. The goal of identity methods provides developers the means to mark any form of content with a sign of identity. Despite any possible modification, evidence of the identity will remain intact as part of the content. Academic transcripts, for example, utilize a system by which copies of the document reveal their own inauthentic status.
Developers seeking to protect textual information, however, may find the difficulty in implementing identity methods on such types of content. Utilizing identity methods on text presents the question of how to integrate the security mechanism with the text in a way which guarantees security should modification occur. Such integration proves exceedingly difficult. Identity methods, therefore, are primarily beneficial to content in which element are determinably recognizable without security information--content forms such as images.
In contrast, dissemination methods are relatively easy to develop for content. Developers may utilize dissemination methods to restrict where an audience retrieves information, as well as restrict what that audience can do with that content. Network security presents one particular example--information exchange with cryptography. In such situations, a single information provider may securely provide information to another party through encryption.
These methods, however, present other problems. The true relative protection of content transmitted through dissemination methods may be in question. If, for example, a developer utilizes dissemination methods to bind content for distribution from a specific server, the information, despite the precautions, may still be copied and modified to appear authentic. In addition, dissemination methods generally limit the distribution of information.
Such problems with both types of methods suggest considerable re-work of the methods may prove beneficial to securing textual content in electronic form. The solution, as the problems suggest, may fall in integrating identity secured content with protected dissemination.