Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) currently presents considerable difficulties to the development and uptake of digital repositories of information objects. This project seeks to create practical DRM systems for digital repositories of information objects.

The work of the project will be focusing on the real-world issues that people are encountering in creating and sharing materials in digital repositories and their associated digital content supply chains.

The project is mainly concerned with exploring the legal and associated cultural, organizational and technical aspects of operating an institutional digital repository of information objects.

The legal dimensions of e-information particularly those affecting the sharing and reuse of information materials in the form of information objects are currently conceived of as presenting serious obstacles to future development, so this project is very timely.

This area (and in fact e-information in general) is strongly affected by and connected to many interest groups and factors that make it difficult to examine individual elements in isolation.

We take the view that to arrive at any meaningful solutions, particularly in the area of IPR, we need to take a systems approach (or a holistic view) of the problem area we are dealing with.

The technical aspect of the project is very important to support the encoding of legal agreements in electronic formats in such a way that can support the partial automation of IPR management in information object repositories.

But we must not lose sight of the fact that this project is primarily about people and institutions (as is e-information).

Thus we shall be looking at the ways we can bring people and institutions to the point where they feel they can enter into legal agreements with each other.

So the project will be composed of two complementary strands one looking at the cultural and legal issues and the other looking at the technical issues.

Rights management systems should incorporate “cooperating”, autonomous components such as:

• Send data with associated policy into a remote, possibility hostile, computing environment and know that the policy will be respected
• Marked content “forensic rights management”
• Labelled content + compliant device
• Encrypted content + compliant device
• Encrypted content + use licenses (fine –grained permissions-based) systems

Research files used

Managing Information.ppt

Copyright Subject Matter.ppt

Trademarks.ppt

Intellectual Property.ppt

Copyright Requirements.ppt

Defenses to Infringement.ppt

Ownership and Duration.ppt

Rights of Copyright Owners.ppt

Patent Infringement.ppt

Intellectual property involves rights information.ppt