Intellectual property restrictions

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Considerations of intellectual property may impede information technology application. Publishers fear illegal distribution of copyrighted material on the Internet. They use techniques like encryption to add digital rights management (DRM) to their material. So, for example, most songs purchased at Apple’s iTunes store may only be played on Apple devices and movies on DVDs cannot be copied into a standard video files on disk drives. Illicit programmers attempt to circumvent DRM techniques, and, indeed, copyrighted material is widely available on the Internet. The threat of piracy tends to keep audio, video and print material locked away.

Open media advocates say DRM harms honest people who wish to make legitimate backup copies of material or to play it on more than one device – for example watching a movie on either a computer or a TV screen. They argue that lobbyists for powerful media companies, not consideration of the public interest, often determine copyright law. The United States exemplifies this. In 1790, Congress established a copyright term of 14 years. The term has been frequently extended (11 times in the last 40 years), and is now the life of the creator plus 70 years. Media companies contend that without strong copyright, they have no incentive to produce content.

There has also been copyright innovation. Richard Stallman and other early open source programmers discovered that their public domain programs were incorporated in proprietary products. In response, Stallman invented the Gnu General Public License (GPL). 1 Under the GPL, an author retains copyright, and others are licensed to use the work as long as the derivative work also has a GPL license. Creative Commons (CC) licensing offers other alternatives. 2 For example, one CC variation allows others to copy, display or perform, but not modify, a work as long as they credit the author and attach the same license to any derivative work.

There has also been marketplace innovation. For example, we saw that http://www.emusic.com has a library of over two million songs, all of which are sold without DRM. Apple’s Steve Jobs reports that only 3% of the songs on a typical high capacity iPod music player use DRM, the rest are unprotected, 3 and suggests doing away with DRM for music. (Copies may still be watermarked, making each slightly different so they can be traced to their source). Many print publishers, for example MIT Press Journals and the University of Michigan Press Digital Culture imprint, charge for printed copies, but offer downloaded versions without DRM.