 |
 |
|
Appendices: 
|
Security, authentication and Digital Rights Management (DRM)Moving that intellectual property around in virtual forms and formats is creating enormous challenges for authors, publishers and information providers. We don’t have to look any farther than the music industry to see the dramatic changes that new access models can have on distribution of intellectual property. Sales of music via online music sites are expected to account for $1.4 billion or 11 percent of music industry sales within the next three years. By 2008, 33 percent of music industry sales will come from downloads.21 “The traditional book as a thematic collection is changing. Books are being decomposed to their fundamental constituent elements.” —Director, Museum Library Three primary technology issues surfaced in our review: security, authentication and digital rights management technologies. The more we researched these topics, the more it became clear that these are not three distinct issues, but are increasingly becoming part of one highly interrelated discussion. Due to the complexity of the issues and the brevity required in this scan, our discussion concentrates on providing an overview of what we will define as the “secure rights management” landscape. How each individual component of secure rights management, security, authentication and Digital Rights Management (DRM) will develop independently is still very unclear. There are hundreds of players, fragmented vertical markets and fuzzy standards. What is clear is that all key players in the information supply chain—content owners, software developers, hardware vendors, wireless and network providers—and the e-commerce infrastructure and payments companies are making substantial investments in both the technology and standards of secure rights management. “Digital Rights Management is a nightmare—too confusing.” —Corporate Librarian At the heart of the digital rights discussion is the desire for owners of content (intellectual property) and users of content to have a reliable mechanism(s) to create, distribute and redistribute intellectual property to any authorized user, anytime, anywhere and on any device and, after distribution, to ensure that content is used as authorized over time. Although the user requirements and the supplier requirements are not at odds, the current business models and technologies infrastructures available to deliver these needs are incompatible. The struggle to develop new models has created significant confusion and disruption for all parties in the information supply chain—which should perhaps be renamed the information supply grid to reflect the interconnected and nonlinear process publishing has become. “One of the greatest impediments to realizing the potential of universal access to digital collections, [is] our current system of protecting intellectual property rights. The system works reasonably well—albeit not perfectly—in the traditional analog environment. Transferring the concepts of copyright to the digital arena, however, raises numerous thorny problems.”22 The notions of what constitutes an author, a publication, a text, for example, do not transfer well from a print world to a digital one. “When theorists talk about the power of the new media to make everyone an author…or to provide everyone with universal access to potential audiences of millions of readers, they invoke a notion of authorship and a model of access that are more appropriate to traditional print media than to electronic communication. What is an author, after all, if the new media no longer support the legal status or institutional privileges that have traditionally defined that role?”23 Two models help to visualize the complexity, and most importantly, the tight integration of the many elements of a secure rights management environment.
DRM Functional Architecture diagram24 As the diagram illustrates, the DRM architecture requires a framework that can manage content creation, management and usage. The DRM architecture must ensure security and authentication at each step of the information supply chain. “Where is scholarly publishing going? Each player says ‘I want to have control over copyright’ but others will want control, too.” —Director, Academic Library A second model, developed by Dr. Mark Stefik, Manager of the Information Sciences and Technologies Laboratory at Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) has been included below to help illustrate the concepts of granting digital rights over the life of an asset.25 An effective DRM architecture will not only require secure rights management at the initial content use, but must remain persistent with the content as it is edited or embedded, in the future. Since next-generation applications will reach much deeper into day-to-day activities of consumers, businesses and governments, they will require built-in safeguards far beyond passwords and physical security. That security must “travel” with the asset as it is consumed, reused and repurposed. That security must also support both the user and the owner.
More and more, there is a move from technologies that provide “copyright protection” (owner-centric) to technology frameworks that enable “rights management” (user-flexible). As outlined in the “Digital Dog” chart above, rights management technologies must meld with other trends. Technology analysts are not sure how this melding of technology and user adoption will occur. Many predict that the technical DRM solutions will not mature as separate solutions, but rather will become embedded features within larger enterprise applications and hardware solutions. Intel, Microsoft, Sun and others have plans to implement DRM features in future releases. It is likely that hardware devices, including cell phones and many entertainment appliances, will also embed DRM features and options. The DRM architectures we discussed in this section will be supported by these technical advances but how quickly, and how effectively, remains to be seen. DRM solution adoption will likely be driven more by economics than technologies. It is still early in the “melding process.” But as one senior information professional reminds us, “Until a workable approach in addressing intellectual property rights is developed, we cannot realize the potential of digital libraries.”27 “How close are we to the Semantic Web that [Tim] Berners-Lee describes? Yes, and my American garage door talks to my Belgian toaster, and they agree I am hungry. Great idea. I think it will take a long time to realize, and that we will go through several generations of enabling technologies before we find ones that are suitable to actually get the job done.”28 —Herbert Van de Sompel
Hype or hope?Our review of the technology landscape identified four major trends. The first, a rush to find ways to bring structure to unstructured data—giving rise to powerful search engines and the emergence of automatic data categorization techniques. Second, we highlighted the move away from highly integrated technology architectures to more distributed, component-based software solutions and the associated rise in Web services. The third major trend identified is the maturing of open-source solutions as legitimate components to an IT department’s technical strategy. Finally, we provided a review of some of potential DRM architectures that may help support the growth of digital libraries. These four trends may be among the more significant developments shaping the technology landscape, but they represent only a fraction of the technological advancements that information professionals must access and evaluate. While it would be impractical to list the hundreds of emerging technologies and standards uncovered during our research, we want to provide an overview of a few more technologies that we feel may have an impact on the future shape of the information landscape. We feel it is important not only to identify these technology trends, but to present them in frameworks that information professionals could use to separate “the hype from the hope” of these new and emerging technologies and tools. What tools are being adopted today? Which technologies are not yet ready for prime time, but may shape the landscape in the next 5–10 years? Which of today’s hot technologies may not survive? We conclude our review of the technology landscape by taking a broad look at several of the specific technologies shaping the future of knowledge management. To provide that overview, we use an adoption framework called “hype cycles” that was developed by Gartner, Inc., the world’s leading technology research and advisory organization.30 Widely used today to help technology professionals assess the maturity of emerging technologies, the hype cycles can provide an interesting view of many of the technologies impacting areas of interest. Gartner provides over 100 hype cycles to its clients. They have granted OCLC permission to use two of those hype cycles for review in this report: the Hype Cycle for Knowledge Management and the Hype Cycle for Web Services.
The Hype Cycle for Knowledge Management, 2003 identifies 23 technologies or solutions that Gartner feels will influence the future development of knowledge management. To understand a technology or technical solution’s placement on the curve is a helpful management device. Gartner has added the element of “human attitude” or “market hype” to the traditional production adoption curve to allow information managers the opportunity to factor in the impact of hype, both positive and negative, on strategic investment decisions. Four of the solutions on the Hype Cycle for Knowledge Management—packaged methodologies, document management, best-practices programs and Web content management—have reached the “plateau of productivity” phase on the curve, indicating that they have been adopted by at least 30 percent of the market and are being deployed today as knowledge management enablers. Gartner plots the remaining 19 of these technologies at various points on the curve and indicates their estimated “time to plateau.” Certain technologies, such as personal knowledge networks and corporate blogging, are very early in the cycle according to Gartner. Others have passed through the “peak of inflated expectations” and are perhaps currently no longer making press headlines, sitting in the “trough of disillusionment.” Automated text categorization, discussed earlier in this section, is located in the trough. Gartner suggests that these technologies should not necessarily be discounted simply because they have fallen from the headlines as they may provide interesting potential that could be realized in a more quiet phase of the adoption cycle. According to its placement on this chart, Gartner estimates that automated text categorization will reach the plateau of productivity with the next two to five years. Several of the top trends and technologies identified in this scan—e-learning, taxonomies and collaboration techniques—are plotted on the Knowledge Management Hype Cycle. In the Hype Cycle for Web Services, 18 technical solutions are plotted to provide a guide to the ever-growing number of Web services solutions that are available today or will be available in the next decade. Web services tailored for specific industries and applications as well as Web services for infrastructure, security, networking and portals, all appear to be on the horizon.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Which technologies have captured the attention of the information consumer? Four technologies should be on your to-do list for 2004.
