CS5604 Summary of readings for Digital Libraries unit Martin Falck 9/1/95 DIGITAL MEDIA AND THE LAW - Samuelson A discussion of some of the legal issues surrounding the advent of digital media. The author builds the article around six characteristics of this media that have caused legal challenges in the past or may require changes in the law currently or in the near future. The first item concerns the ease of which digital media may be replicated by the same equipment required to use it. While copyright laws have historically been relatively easy to enforce due to difficulty of reproduction or traceability, digital media makes traditional enforcement methods obsolete. The landmark Sony Betamax case resulted in a decision that, while not condoning all copying as legal, essentially removed some of the legal obstacles relating to the marketing of digital media. The DAT agreement to charge royalties for the equipment up front, on the other hand, seems to set a precedent in the opposite direction. The section on the ease of transmission of digital media really doesn't do much more than state the traditional problem of sharing software. The author seems to miss the fact that there are a number of effective methods to prevent this. Hoever, the point here is that, should technical means fail, the burden still falls on the copyright owners to find their own methods of compensation since current laws are ineffective here. The next topic, plasticity, is really the fuzziest legal issues. Some of the issues here are: - recordings derived from bits of others - manipulation of photographs - derivative works, and whether thay can be sold - author's liability regarding modified works Adding to the confusion is the concept that these may be more moral than legal issues and outside of the government's area of responsibility. The section on equivalency of works deals with the problem of classifying multimedia works and determining intellectual property. Copyright law has traditionally adpated to new media, even those mixing different forms. Digital multimedia documents, howver, allow a combination of works, interactive documents, etc. that make it difficult to specify precisely what is to be copyrighted and by whom. The compactness of digital media provides obvious benefits but some problems in the legal area. First is the problem of security, since anyone can walk off with a disk containing huge amounts of information. The volume of material creates the additional problem of searching through it. Consequently, users are more dependent than ever on user interface tools. Nonlinearity deals with the capability in digital media to access works according to a user defined path, as opposed to the more traditional start to finish approach. Hypertext, using bookmarks to save the search path, creates a new form of intellectual property. This can be compared to a copyrighted bibliography of the works of others. Because hypertext is a capability of the machine and not the work, it is not yet clear whether this is a patent or a copyright issue. The purpose of these six issues is to recognize that traditional property law may not have the ability to cope with digital media. The author concludes that intellectual property law will probably look much different when updated to deal with digital media. = = = = = = = = == = = = = = = = = = = == = == = = = = = = = = Group 5 Shirley Carr Mike Joyce Bushra Khan Vas Madhavan Samuelson, Pamela, October 1991, Digital Media and the Law, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 34, No. 10, pp. 23-28. This article examines six characteristics (i.e., ease of replication, ease of transmission, plasticity, equivalence of works in digital form, compactness or works, and nonlinearity) of digital media and their potential to change intellectual property law. The Replication discussion touches upon the Sony Betamax case and its implications, and discusses several schemes for generating revenue in connection with electronic publishing. The Transmission and Multiple Use section deals with piracy and efforts to control transmission of works in digital form. Plasticity, a key attraction of digital media, requires careful balancing of this benefit with the need for extending copyright protection to derivative works. Equivalence issues, which are treated very briefly, relate to how existing copyright laws deal with different media. These media distinction blur in the digital realm. Compactness - works in digital form do not take up much space - allows new, unanticipated assemblages of information to be created easily. Current intellectual property laws may not address these combinations. Compactness also creates a dependency on the user interface system. Finally, the digital form creates the potential for nonlinearity experiences with text. The discussion raises the issue of whether the indexing method (in digital form) and search trail are themselves protectable works of authorship. ================================================================ CS 5604 Information Storage and Retrieval Unit 1-- Digital Libraries Group II Submission: Lauren Barton Martin Falck Nelson Kile, Jr. Carolyn O'Hare Robert Ryan Digital media and the law This article was written by Pamela Samuelson, a Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. It discusses the legal ramifications of emerging digital media. The article specifically looks at six elements of digital media which differentiate it from other media and discusses how the law is coping with it. Ease of replication - unlike prior ways to copy information (hand copying, presses), reprography made the copying of printed information easier. Reprography made it more difficult for copyright owners to control access to the media. There is also a public perception that copying works for private use is lawful even though it may not be. Digital media is even more threatening than reprography to copyright owners. Digital medium allows a user to make numerous perfect copies easily. copyright law has traditionally not provided copyright owners with exclusive rights to control the use of copies of their work. There are two exceptions: - record rentals services were legislated away. - rental of computer programs without the copyright owners permission. Ease of transmission and multiple use - unlike printed media which require large printing presses and distribution networks, digital works may easily transmitted to multiple users. With printed media, even if someone published illegal copies, the purchaser could not make additional copies. With digital media the illegal copy may be widely distributed to additional users. owners are concerned about what happens to each pirated copy. shrink wrap licenses and copy protect systems have not been of great effect. These problems present a challenge to copyright enforcement. The author predicts that owners will attempt to restrict access and use and to derive revenue from use rather than sales of copies. Plasticity of digital media - printed information is fixed and cannot be easily updated. Having information in a digital format allows easier updating, however, these update can also easily be made without the owner knowledge. Owners have reason for concern for what a user will do with their copy of a work. The user may manipulate the work to change the meaning or function of a program. U.S. copyright law gives copyright owners the right to control the making of derivative works. however under the first sale rule, owners of protected works have the right to exercise personal property rights in their copy of the work as long as they have tithed to the copyright owner upon first sale of the copy to the public by the price they paid for the copy. Case law seems to require that a second work must have copied protected expression from the first to be an infringing derivative. The author recommends a balance be achieved balance between the interest of copyright owners and the interests of consumers in being able to take advantage of Digital medium's plasticity. Equivalence of works in digital form - copyright law has traditionally treated different kinds of works differently. Some classes of works have special privileges to copy or make certain use of. Others do not. One reason for this is to reflect differences in media by which works have been brought to the Public (books, sculpture, phonograph records etc.). The law must also account for the combining of different media. Any of these other media may also be brought into digital format. This convertibility makes it more difficult to distinguish between different media. In addition, the line between writings and data is blurring and patents are now being issued for computer programs. These fact are leading to additional questions as to exactly which part of the program is being patented. Compactness of works in digital form - digital format does not take as much space as traditional media, therefore they are easier to steal. This includes company sensitive data. Compactness also means that it is difficult to see more than a Small amount to the data at one time. This makes the user more dependent on the interface system. Each users needs to construct customized portholes to look at information. Nonlinearity - nonlinear searches through text make page numbers meaningless. Current texts allow limited linking (footnotes) but digital media allows linking various texts by mechanisms such as hypertext. Digital media allows creation of mechanisms to navigate different libraries to find information. this linking of works in digital form raises additional questions about who should own the right to the linking scheme. Also, one could question if linking various texts would infringe on the rights of the person who wrote those texts. conclusion - digital media seems likely to change the face of intellectual property law. ================================================================= Trish Heiman Unit DL Document Summaries: Digital Media and the Law Ms. Samuelson described and discussed six characteristics of digital medium that presents challenging legal issues. The ease with which digital media can be replicated and transmitted make it especially difficult to enforce copyright law. Derivative wor ks and "Non-linearity" make it difficult to maintain credit for the original creators. The author contends, however, that we will continue to have intellectual property law but it will be much revised. = = = = = = = = = = = == = = = = = = = = = = = == = DL Article Summaries. Group 1 James B. Fitzgerald Tom Kalafut Chris Klein John Muhlenburg Digital Media and the Law by Pamela Samuelson This article attempts to predict possible legal problems that may arise when older copyright laws are applied to electronic software and publishing. The article suggests that digital media has certain properties that make application of the copyright laws difficult. These properties are Ease of Replication, Ease of Transmission and Multiple Use, the Plasticity of Digital Media, Equivalence of Works in Digital Form, Compactness of Works in Digital Form, and Nonlinearity. The Ease of Replication presents a problem because reproduction of a copyrighted work originally required setting up a printing press. This action made the replication of any work a chore, and one that could be easily dealt with if the location of the printing press were known. However, replication is much easier today. Having a software program is equated to having a software production facility, each program is capable of making countless copies of itself. The Ease of Transmission and Multiple Use problem presents another problem to the copyright law. Transmission of digital media is extremely easy to achieve and quite difficult to stop. Also, when pirated works were transmitted from one person to another in days of old, the actual copy of the work left possession of one person and entered the possession of another. In today's world with digital media that is no longer a necessity. A pirated copy can be transmitted to another user while still retaining a copy of the pirated work. Another copyright problem is due to the Plasticity of Digital Media. Since digital works are relatively easy to change, what is there to prevent people from modifying a work then repackaging it. This can also present a problem in that articles can now easily be changed and therefore may misrepresent what the author originally intended. Copyright laws, in the past, have treated works in different kinds of media differently. How then does this get applied when all these different works can be represented in some form of digital media. This leads to the Equivalence of Works in Digital Form problem. Do they all get treated equally, or do new laws need to be created to deal with old works in a new form? The Compactness of works in Digital Form problem is created due to the fact that storage of works in digital form do not take up much space. This results in digital works being easier to steal. Also this compactness results in the inability to successfully access needed information without the aid of adequate search utilities designed for the digital work. The last property of digital media mentioned that causes problems with current copyright laws is Nonlinearity experience created in texts. This is described as the ability to follow an idea or data path through several articles via hypertext without having to access entire articles. Does this search trail that gets created then itself become copyrightable? Does this mean that if this electronic trail is followed that the creator of the data path is somehow entitled to compensation? The conclusion reached by the author is that the present copyright laws are inadequate to support the electronic age and digital media. These laws will grow and evolve as the influence of digital media grows.