Intellectual Property

1 Introduction

Intellectual property rights management is a broad term that describe an organisation’s processed for managing rights creation, licensing and usage, whether the content is digital or not.

Intellectual property is another part of data management which provides the legal protection upon data holder to their creations. In this note, we only describe conceptions and projects related with digital content.

2 DRM (Digital Rights Management)

In general, "Digital Rights Management" is a term used for technologies that control how digital content is used. In this digital age, Digital Rights Management poses one of the greatest challenges for content communities. Traditional rights management of physical materials benefited from the materials' physicality as this provided some barrier to unauthorized exploitation of content. However, today we already see serious breaches of copyright law because of the ease with which digital files can be copied and transmitted.

There are two generations in the development of DRM.The first-generation of DRM focused on security and encryption as a means of solving the issue of unauthorized copying, that is, lock the content and limit its distribution to only those who pay. It represented a substantial narrowing of the real and broader capabilities of DRM. The second-generation of DRM covers the description, identification, trading, protection, monitoring and tracking of all forms of rights usages over both tangible and intangible assets including management of rights holders relationships. Additionally, it is important to note that DRM is the "digital management of rights" and not the "management of digital rights". That is, DRM manages all rights, not only the rights applicable to permissions over digital content.

The functional architecture of a DRM system should have three layers, which covers the high-level modules or components of the DRM system that together provide an end-to-end management of rights.

• Intellectual Property Asset Creation and Capture: How to manage the creation of content so it can be easily traded. This includes asserting rights when content is first created (or reused and extended with appropriate rights to do so) by various content creators/providers.
• IP Asset Management: How to manage and enable the trade of content. This includes accepting content from creators into an asset management system. The trading systems need to manage the descriptive metadata and rights metadata (e.g., parties, usages, payments, etc.).
• IP Asset Usage: How to manage the usage of content once it has been traded.

This includes supporting constraints over traded content in specific desktop systems/software.

3 Creative and Science Commons

Creative Commons was founded in 2001 with the generous support of the Center for the Public Domain. It is led by a Board of Directors that includes cyberlaw and intellectual property experts James Boyle, Michael Carroll, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling, and Lawrence Lessig, MIT computer science professor Hal Abelson, lawyer-turned-documentary filmmaker-turned-cyberlaw expert Eric Saltzman, renowned documentary filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, noted Japanese entrepreneur Joi Ito, and public domain web publisher Eric Eldred.

Science Commons is a project of Creative Commons launched in 2005. It’s goal is to accelerate the scientific research cycle by the following principles:

• Science Commons serves the advancement of science by removing unnecessary legal and technical barriers to scientific collaboration and innovation;
• Built on the promise of Open Access to scholarly literature and data, Science Commons identifies and eases key barriers to the movement of information, tools and data through the scientific research cycle.
• Science Commons’s long term vision is to provide more than just useful contracts. It will combine its publishing, data, and licensing approaches to develop solutions for a truly integrated and streamlined research process.

Early in 2006, after a year long period of research, Science Commons targeted three areas for focused work: scholarly publishing, licensing policies, and the realization of the “semantic web” for science. Here, we summarize the aims of each project.

Table 1 Projects in Science Commons