Intellectual-Property Protection Opens Path for E-commerce

O ne of the hottest areas of e-commerce is the online sale of music, documents, software, and other forms of intellectual property. To make these efforts successful, however , vendors face a critical concern: how to protect the intellectual property they're trying to sell over the Internet and keep people from copying, forwarding, reselling, or otherwise using it without payment or authorization. Preventing unauthorized use of intellectual property is a challenge when working in today's online world. Digital technologies enable exact duplication of commercial intellectual property, permitting original-quality reproductions. However, this works for both authorized and unauthorized users. Meanwhile, vendors can use the Internet to sell intellectual property, but individuals can also use it to improperly download and distribute content. With billions of dollars at stake, vendors are investing in technologies for encrypting intellectual property and defining user rights. For example, the music industry, which has suffered large-scale piracy with the unauthorized distribution of content provided via MP3 technology, is working on complex standards for protecting their products. (See the sidebar, " Facing the Digital Music. ") Content vendors take different approaches to protecting their intellectual property. Some companies (such as IBM, InterTrust, and Wave Systems) are offering prepackaged multipurpose technologies that vendors of various types of content can purchase. There are a number of concerns about intellectual-property-protection technology. For example, some people are worried that the technology will give content owners so much control over their material that research scientists, students, journalists, and others will lose the access to intellectual property for academic and public-interest purposes that they have traditionally had. Nonetheless, the sale of intellectual property has so much potential for generating revenue, vendors plan to aggressively pursue protective technologies. A key concept for intellectual-property protection technology is the trusted system. These systems, which can be devices or applications, can be trusted to follow usage-limitation rules implemented by content owners. This can be a challenge on the PC platform , though, which is not controlled by content vendors and which makes the copying of content very easy. " It is difficult on systems that are open, " explained Mark Stefik, principal scientist at Xerox PARC, who has conducted extensive research into intellectual property protection. This is why much of the work in intellectual property protection technology has focused on the PC. Generally, vendors implement intellectual property protection by inserting machine-readable tags in the content. The tags, which the …