This article gives valuable insight into copyright and legal matters, but is especially helpful in pointing out important characteristics of digital media. The six characteristics should be carefully studies and pondered. The last one, on nonlinearity, should be re-read after completion of Unit 8 on Hypertext. Note that Ms. Samuelson's husband is Robert Glusko, who has been very active in R&Drelating to hypertext.
The second section, on Replication, explains an influential court case and its implications, and discusses several clever schemes for generating revenue in connection with electronic publishing.
Key to our course are the remaining sections. Transmission and Multiple Use are essential parts of digital libraries, but there are serious dangers of piracy. Plasticity is one of the key added values of digital media, but protecting authors' rights will demand careful balancing of this benefit with the need for extending copyright protection to changes. Equivalence issues relate to multimedia, but are not clearly explained here. Compactness is not really the theme of the next section - rather it is about storage cost-effectiveness and storage hierarchies, an idea which dates back to such discussions as [3]. Issues of nonlinearity will be dealt with later in the course, but are previewed in an interesting way here.