Fifteen years ago, in November 1994, I was two years into a Ph.D. program at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College. I had entered Dartmouth with a background in computer engineering and an interest in "special-purpose systems," a narrow field that focuses on creating computing systems that are exceptionally good at a very narrow range of operations, such as particle-in-cell simulation or gene sequence processing. This interest led me across campus to become a research assistant in Dr. Joseph V. Henderson's pioneering Interactive Media Lab at Dartmouth Medical School --- at first to consider the infrastructural problems of delivering IML's high-value multimedia training programs across the Internet, and by mid-1994 over a novel set of technologies known as the "World Wide Web."
As the story goes, the IML team was preparing a major set of demos for a visit by Dr. C. Everett Koop, a Dartmouth alumnus, area resident and recently retired as one of the more influential Surgeons General the United States has ever had. My particular focus was creating an interactive web site for IML, focusing in particular on the delivery of several key video sequences via the web. Several of us worked long into the night to migrate a few select videos into tolerable Quicktime format and suitable "thumbnails," then onto the lab's server, then linked (for downloading) from web pages, and finally viewable on the demo Mac.
When Joe arrived on the morning of our demo, I greeted him with (something like), "Joe, I got the 'Binding Sequence up on the Web!'" His incredibly insightful response was:
John, that's great!...John, that's terrible!
Joe preceded to express his concerns about two fundamental implications of my "success":
- The copyright implications, especially as many IML programs were funded by private entities that retained certain rights to the works;
- The implications of dis-aggregating medical and other training programs and delivering their content out-of-context, possibly doing harm to their message due to loss of design integrity.
Joe framed the challenge for me: to study the question of rights management from the perspective of multimedia production. In 24 hours, I learned that this was an important and rising issue that was not going away; that very little research had been done on the question from a practical standpoint; that the few proposed solutions at the time were overly simplistic, equating "copyright management" with "security" and in fact did neither; and no one appeared to be considering the issues from the perspective of the creator. In 24 hours, my Ph.D. topic was born!
This leads us to 1 November 1994 when I presented my dissertation proposal, which included as an example research artifact my Mr. Copyright(tm) prototype --- quickly re-named at the urging of my committee and others to LicensIt(tm). LicensIt demonstrated in the form of a easy-to-use, desktop "appliance" the key ideas of (a) binding actionable copyright metadata to multimedia objects, and (b) user-friendly, real-time, networked copyright registration. The LicensIt desktop icon said it all: modeled after the famous Stuffit(tm) coffee grinder, users dragged and dropped their content (initially GIF files) onto LicensIt; a dialog popped up to collect (and display) their descriptive and other metadata and to enable them to select their "registration server" from a menu of choices; their work was registered. By way of both the static metadata and the registry, users would be able to contact the principals involved in the creation of the item. I envisioned several other options, including registering digital signatures to allow users to authenticate a work in hand, as well as enveloping the work in an encrypted envelope.
It is important to note that the focus of my work at that time was on enabling copyright by binding static and dynamic metadata to content and especially to make it as accessible as possible within the context of use; content security was only a secondary concern. "Enablement" means that although a desktop client is interesting, plugins for creation tools like Photoshop, Acrobat and Macromedia Director, and enjoyment tools like Mosiac --- this was 1994!! --- would be infinitely more interesting and useful! I assumed that one day, creators would be mixing and matching content found around the web, and at least commercial and other highly visible producers would want/need to "do the right thing" w.r.t. copyright and thus would benefit from instantly accessible attribution, bound to the item. Note that I was heavily influenced at that time by the writings of Prof. Henry H. Perritt, Jr. whose concept of permissions headers was not only an inspiration for me, but I believe anticipated Creative Commons licensing templates.
Fifteen years later, we can at least say the world is different! The world we imagined 15 years ago of rampant "re-mixing" of content has arrived; licensing models such as Creative Commons have improved awareness; but still the infrastructure does not accommodate the discovery and transmission of rights information as readily as it should. With the rise of new data-centric models such as Linked Data (a practical outcome of Semantic Web research) and the acceptable of persistent identifier systems including the Handle System and the Digital Object Identifier, we're getting there...
Next installment: The NetRights and YRM years...
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