Dan Hunter, Digital rights management and mass amateurization, Indicare, May 31, 2005. Excerpt: 'Open access and open source usually have no truck with DRM. Clearly the common view of DRM that it is about access control is inconsistent with both open access and open source philosophies. One cannot subscribe to open source or open access principles without accepting that the user is free to pass the material on to others, to read without cost, use and reuse, and so on. But as Poynder (2005) explains in an earlier INDICARE article, if one views DRM in its widest form, it is not necessarily inconsistent with open access. He makes the important point that open access authors still want to retain some rights, most notably the right of attribution, and he suggests this interest can be supported by DRM. Purists might argue that this can be achieved with digital watermarking, which is of course correct. But watermarking is a form of DRM; and this form of DRM happens to support the interests of open access. I agree here with Poynder....The vast majority of Creative Commons licenses that have been adopted to date (around 95%) require the licensee to attribute the work to its author, no matter what other conditions of use are attached. The lesson of this, and of various other examples of amateur content, is that the attribution interest is probably the most fundamental incentive of creativity in areas that are not driven by commercial concerns. It is possible then that a truly beneficial role for DRM exists in making attribution run with content, so that the author will know that her name will live as long as the content is being used. Of course this is not the traditional view of DRM, and indeed DRM generally speaking does not handle this particularly well....We should be careful therefore to assume that DRM is always bad, and that commercial use of DRM will always trend towards over-control of the content.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/31/2005 11:59:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
