DRM & Me Part II: "Copyright for the rest of us!"

In Part I of this retrospective I covered the raw beginnings of my interest and research in enabling copyright in the digital, networked environment. In this second part I'll discuss work my colleagues and I did to take these ideas commercial, and I'll continue to focus on core principles of my work in content identification and metadata architecture, summed up by this quote (attributed to me!): Metadata is the lifeblood of e-commerce!

As the spring of 1995 approached it became clear that there was an opportunity to make a unique contribution to improving the world of copyright in the digital, networked environment. As I prepared to present a paper at ED-MEDIA 95 in Graz, Austria, I was approached by local businessman who had been principals in a successful software company, Corporate Microsystems, Inc., that had just been acquired by a global enterprise software company. As the story goes, they were looking for an original idea upon to base their next start-up, and I was looking for a strategy for implementing my research ideas that would scale well beyond what I was capable of doing part-time as a researcher at IML. Over the summer of 1995 my future partners Gerry Hunt, Theo Pozzy, Henry Adams, Hal Franklin and I held numerous planning meetings, and on 1 November 1995 NetRights, LLC was born!

We started NetRights at a time when other players, in particular InterTrust (then still called EPR) and IBM InfoMarket were starting to draw attention to their robust, encryption-based "envelope" strategies for "protecting copyright" --- quotes intentional! --- and the term digital rights management wasn't yet in standard use. Taking a clue from my prototype work at Dartmouth, the core idea behind LicensIt(tm) (later @attribute) was to "objectify" flat multimedia objects using secure wrappers whose primary objective was to provide structured metadata about the object in hand. Our goal was to provide rich static and Internet-served dynamic metadata to facilitate "conversations" between creators and users of content. Our motif for "experiencing" copyright was a simple and elegant: A user sees a photo, audio clip, video, even an embedded text snippet; they "right-click" on it and a tabbed set of property pages is displayed; they use those various pages to view descriptions of the content, to start emails with the creator or other contributors, to view default terms of use, even to initiate live rights transactions, all while staying within the context of use.

From a technical standpoint we were using OLE structured storage in very much the same way as XML (and especially RDF) is used today. Our development team, including Mark Schlageter, Norm Tiedemann, Mark Markus and Dan O'Connor (our sole Mac-head!), created amazing tools that let us design not only these metadata structures, but to actually create "soft" property-page layout templates (think CSS!) that were packaged with the metadata, enabling customized content-specific views. Considerable infrastructure was required to make all of this work, starting with OLE services installed on the user machine, to the tools for design and packaging, to back-end services for object registration. Also, major, bet-the-company decisions about PC vs Mac, "networked COM" (which became ActiveX), Spyglass/IE vs Mosaic/Netscape support, etc. To a startup company, Bill Gates' commitment of Microsoft to "embracing and extending" the Internet in late 1995 was helpful!

Trade journals like Seybold took notice and wondered whether our "kinder, gentler" approach to copyright, which by that time (June 1996) we were calling "enhanced attribution," might actually be a better option than so-called "opaque packages." Publishers were torn; they liked the obvious value our approach was bringing to the user and the fact that we were actually facilitating the copyright process, but they also couldn't get over their perceived need for "strong protection."

Today we see echoes all over the Internet of infrastructure and technology that make "copyright for the rest of us" radically easier than it was at NetRights birth in 1995. First and foremost are systems of globally unique, persistent object identifiers, in particular the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), implemented on CNRI's Handle System. (As it happens, that same 1996 issue of Seybold also carried an article about the birth of the DOI!) RDF provides a universal information model for conveying metadata assertions (local and remote) about objects; RDFa provides a way to do this within (esp.) web documents. The recent massive and growing interest in publishing Linked data by organizations, including governments, has fortified distributed metadata as a means of conveying object information from a variety of sources. And special mention must be made of The Creative Commons, which has applied most of these techniques to not only make the process of copyright readily accessible to creators and users all over the world, but also to make content use safe through the explicit and unambiguous communication of terms of its use.

Providing immediate, unambiguous expression of copyright information and connections to processes for any piece of content was my mantra starting in the lab at Dartmouth, then at NetRights, and following our acquisition in 1997 by Digimarc, with the creation of Copyright Direct(tm) at Yankee Rights Management (YRM) and my subsequent involvement with the content identification and metadata communities. More on that in our next installment...