Digital Rights Management and Digital Libaries – A User ’ s Perspective

This paper addresses a significant aspect of digital rights management (DRM): the unique challenges of building a working DRM infrastructure for networked digital libraries or repositories. We outline how, based on our experience with building, populating and operating a digital library, many of the existing problems for the current generation of DRM technology are magnified in a distributed, networked environment. In particular, the evolution of standards in the DRM industry, the questionable adaptability of DRM technology to consumer preferences, and daunting technical issues such as authentication and rights specification are all made more difficult when content is distributed through a network, especially when the content is broken down into smaller pieces to increase access and utility. Moreover, we believe that, to the extent one or more rights specification standards appear to be gaining a foothold in some market sectors, they may not adequately address the needs of the educational community that will be a significant user set for digital libraries.