When originally drafted, the primary medium of concern for protection by Statute of Anne surrounded publishing written works (Timeline 1). Since the establishment of copyright law in the Constitution, the U.S. government has seen fit to expand the coverage of intellectual property protection to other media. In recent years, however, some media have proven more difficult to protect because of the technological capacity for ease of copying and dissemination. To examine the historical methods of copyright and protection may provide some understanding of the rationale and method behind the protection of World Wide Web content.
While web developers are primarily concerned with computer data, non-computer-based media require security of intellectual property as well. Security in print publishing, visual arts, and official documents may provide models for securing digital information.
When initially envisioned, copyright legislation protected works of a literary nature--books, poetry, dramatic transcriptions. The difficulty in contrasting the attributes of digital information and non-electric media reveals the primary difference between digital data and largely every other media--non-digital media like books and newspapers provide a certain self-contained protection. The benefits of providing production to text create for the information a recognizable form--the book, the newspaper- -where all aspects of product become part of the information.
Parties that wish to misappropriate the printed information of a book or other printed medium must either create mechanical reproductions or painstakingly copy the information. While some parties may remove the copyright notice of a novel, the entire production of creating the book itself, from the typesetting to the binding, guarantees an effective identity security of the information contained therein.
Similarly, the visual arts largely protect themselves from replication by virtue of intrinsic attributes. Works of sculpture, paintings, and film offer physical deterrents to direct appropriation of information. The data that are vital to the work reside as part of the work itself--avoiding most possibilities of information theft. An artist imbues a given work, a sculpture, a painting, with details like technique and medium, as well as individual style--all attributes that offer the visual arts a certain self-contained protection against appropriation. Such attributes guarantee the integrity of the intellectual property which an author or artist or director puts forth in the work's creation; of all non-digital media, the visual arts likely benefit most from their physicality.
Like the replication of printed documents, the misappropriation of the visual arts would require the painstakingly detailed duplication. Forgeries of paintings, sculptures and other visual arts must not only capture the visual details of a work, but nuances such as brush strokes. As such, the visual arts benefit most from the security of identity.
Even with the intrinsic benefit of physicality, however, some non-digital media present difficulties when considering the problems of authenticity. To maintain authenticity with official documents such as currency or school transcripts, many facilities provide watermarks on the printed material. These watermarks prevent unauthorized appropriation, modification, or replication of such documents. Such watermarks can, in the aforementioned examples, deter the forgery of currency and school transcripts and provide authenticity to valid documents.
Parties seeking to misappropriate official documents would need to obtain the printing and protection details of the material they seek to copy or modify. Through the use of counterfeit printing plates or pre-printed materials, duplication or modification of official documents would be considerably easier than copying the visual arts. For many documents, however, the degree of protection matches the value of the information. American currency, for example, has multiple levels of identity protection as opposed to school transcripts.
An examination of the attributes of most digital media reveals the difficulty in examining the methods for the protection of non-digital media--most non-digital methods have no analogue in the electronic world. Digital media, especially textual content, largely do not have the same physicality that provides such benefit to media such as sculpture or paintings. Because of the ease of appropriation, replication, and modification of digital media, most electronic works require a different approach in protecting the information contained within. How these methods apply to the protection of textual content offers some insight into the promise they may offer to the World Wide Web.
Many artists consider the security of digital images paramount in the discussion of intellectual property over the World Wide Web. Because images provide a certain visual physicality, however, wherein a viewer can superficially determine key attributes of visual information, electronically-based graphics can utilize a process similar to the watermarking of currency for authentication and protection. Granted, an artist could place an obtrusive copyright mark upon their images, but Mary E. Carter, author of Electronic Highway Robbery, indicates that placing a digital watermark upon an image is "one of the easiest ways to protect a digital image," which eliminates the need for an obvious signature. With such a digital watermark, an artist could provide a secured portfolio so viewers could "review the work and see it displayed on their monitors, but they [would] not be able to reproduce [the work] on paper" (Carter 128). Carter delineates the process to place a watermark on a digital image as follows:
More sophisticated software, such as the latest version of Adobe Systems' photo-manipulation tool, Photoshop 4.0, may provide simpler interfaces to the addition of such watermarks to an image. While placing a watermark upon an image may seem of limited value for a work that could be infinitely replicated, any paper reproduction of the image should, like such methods on school transcripts, reveal the hidden mark. Any party wishing to remove the watermark would "have to go to considerable trouble to re-create the cyan plate of [the] image" (Carter 130).
Though most closely related to the methods utilized on more physical media, the identity method of watermarking of digital images presents problems to content developers. When utilizing a watermark, the process by which a developer may create a protected document for distribution over the World Wide Web increases in difficulty. The presentation of textual content as part of graphic content requires that those who wish to distribute information use software which at times may be complex as well as expensive. In addition, while most web browsers have the capacity to view images, some browsers, indeed some users, do not have the facility to read the text as part of the image.
Despite these drawbacks, European Community research into intellectual property rights over digital media offers two opportunities for securing rights over images. ACCOPI and TALISMAN offer standards by which European content developers may secure property rights over images. ACCOPI, or Access Control and Copyright Protection for Images, aims to address the issues of access control and copyright protection for broadcast images services" (ACCOPI 1). At this time, the ACCOPI has developed a common functional model to accommodate the needs of European content distributors and European service providers.
TALISMAN (Tracing Authors' Rights by Labelling [sic] Image Services and Monitoring Access Networks) seeks to provide European service providers "with a standard copyright mechanism to protect their digital products against large scale commercial piracy and illegal copying" (TALISMAN 1). Through various means including labeling and monitoring--combining identity and dissemination methods--TALISMAN attempts to ensure the security of the intellectual property rights of images. Unfortunately, both ACCOPI and TALISMAN are primarily concerned with the security of broadcast images--television and HDTV media and video media. While these methods may offer some benefits to text protection, developers would likely reap such benefits through tools applying analogous techniques rather than the direct use of such methods for the security of textual content.
Given that the primary medium of consideration, the World Wide Web, operates on HTML documents, any discussion of the security of intellectual property over the web should merit an examination of HyperText Markup Language (HTML). Unfortunately, as designed, the aims of HTML 4.0 include interoperability and accessibility, arguably principles that counter the aim of intellectual property security. To speak of deficiencies in HTML with respect to intellectual property ironically emphasizes one of the markup language's major strengths--the provision that many clients on various operating systems and platforms can view such documents. As designed, however, HTML offers no provisions for the security of universally accessible content.
When considering the World Wide Web, an overview of supported media reveals Java programs as a particular medium with a large degree of flexibility. While not restricted to the Web, Java programs have provided developers a means by which to integrate application functionality to the simple interface of the web. The flexibility that Java provides to many web browsers may offer a possibility in the transmission of secure textual content. Given Java's use in web pages, developers can wrap the text distribution in an applet. A user viewing the text in the applet would not have the capacity to select, copy, and paste the text--one particular advantage of distributing text through an applet.
Because Java is a programming language, the method of securing the text, beyond the prevention of selection and copy of small pieces of text, would reside in the applet code itself. As described in Web Developer magazine, the code segment in Figure 2-1 illustrates a dissemination method by which a Java programmer can loosely secure a Java applet from use by unwanted persons (Clark 20). The method by which the code avoids misappropriation, however, is not foolproof. While more sophisticated attackers can utilize Java's disassembler to work around the obstacle, the code nevertheless may deter many who would appropriate an applet.
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| Figure 2-1. Dissemination Security of a Java Applet. |
While the development of tools to present text via Java applet may serve a boon to content distributors, the creation of such textual content for distribution would likely involve direct Java programming. Programmers, as well, could explore another alternative--the development of tools for the creation of applets for text distribution. While developers could use such tools to create applets, because many client browsers are not Java-capable, this solution provides protection to a limited client base. In addition, as previously mentioned, aside from the relative simplicity of the protection, such provisions could be outwitted with the proper expertise. Because these limitations introduce a greater complexity to the information provider and information seeker, such a solution, though perhaps moderately effective, proves difficult to manage for both parties.
A dissemination method that offers information providers and seekers a simpler solution, a standard portable document format also delivers consistency within form. When working on the Web, many developers may wish to eschew the purely structural markup of HTML for a more design-oriented media. Utilizing portable document programs to publish documents allows developers to maintain a standard look-and-feel for content, avoiding the arbitrary positioning of HTML elements. Despite these aesthetic considerations, portable document programs also allow developers some control over rights over content.
Perhaps the most prevalent portable document format, Adobe Systems' Acrobat software allows users to create, literally, a Portable Document Format (PDF) file. Aside from the inherent protections of a proprietary format, Acrobat format files have no specific intellectual property rights provisions. Hummingbird's Common Ground and Digital Paper format, however, allow developers to specifically determine the actions a given end user may take with protected content. Developers can determine the user's ability to print, copy or annotate content. Replica, another portable document format, allows developers to set a given document as read-only (Carter 126).
The primary disadvantage to such portable document formats is the requirement to the information seeker for the installation of separate applications to the client software. While Digital Paper and Replica may offer a viable solution to the problems of property rights and content, the detriment of utilizing such proprietary formats for the transmission of content is the failure of these formats and tools to account for all client possibilities. While some formats have reader software in various platforms, the reader software for use with other formats generally operates only on limited systems such as exclusively on the Microsoft Windows operating system or only on the Apple Macintosh. Hummingbird, however, intends to offer users the platform-independent option of Java. While the advent of Java offers the means for software developers to add multi-platform support for portable documents, intellectual property information should ideally be transmitted seamlessly through web client software. Web client software with an understanding of the intellectual property details of documents would eliminate the need for excessive data transfer.
One alternative for the solution of securing of intellectual property, the use of encryption can be easily integrated into the operations of a web client. In utilizing encryption for distribution, developers can achieve a high security solution to the protection of intellectual property. Of all solutions, encryption seems the most likely to be configurable to achieve both identity and dissemination objectives. While such considerations may be a boon, however, the mass distribution of content would be troublesome.
In many cryptographic systems, only the intended viewer or viewers of given information would have the ability to access such information. In addition, content developers, perhaps seeking to offer information to viewers, would likely find encryption an inflexible solution. Information providers would encounter some difficulty in restricting viewers from specific actions using simple encryption, such as the prevention of quoting or printing of content. To secure the rights over the World Wide Web, developers will likely seek both wider distribution and greater control over functionality.
IBM utilizes a system known as Cryptolope to provide encrypted distribution functionality to web sites. Cryptolope provides a means by which content, be it software, text, images, multimedia, or anything else, is encrypted and digitally signed to provide for content authenticity. Packaged within a "Cryptolope container," the content includes unencrypted metadata such as prices and conditions that specify the access and purchase terms of the content. Should receivers wish to access the content, they may then initiate a "buy request" which, when transmitted to a central clearinghouse, processes payments and manages rights.
At this time, however, the Cryptolope server software is only available on Windows 95 and Windows NT platforms, rendering the large majority of Unix-based web sites unable to utilize such technology. In addition, the receiver of Cryptolope containers must, as in the case of portable document formats, install the separate client application Cryptolope Opener, restricting the audience for content to particular platforms or operating systems.
Xerox PARC recently released information regarding their Digital Property Rights Language or DPRL. Content developers can use the Xerox Rights Editor "to assign DPRL rights to a digital work, be it a book, movie, software, or any digital file" (Walsh 1). Like the Cryptolope system, DPRL provides encrypted content in a container or digital envelope. Based on the developer-assigned rights, the software will determine what actions the viewer can and cannot perform on the content. Such actions, aside from viewing and copying may also include provisions to watermark printed content as well as disallowing printing to non-trusted printers.
One particular benefit of Xerox's technology, researchers are currently attempting to code software components in Java, ensuring DPRL availability on all platforms. The attempt to provide software to all platforms eliminates the problems associated with IBM's Cryptolope technology. At this time, however, current news of DPRL has not revealed any further progress with the technology. While DPRL may provide a fitting platform-independent solution to the problem of securing rights over the World Wide Web, Xerox has yet to present a clear method for the technology.