Intellectual Property Rights In The Digital Library

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Intellectual property refers to rights in creations of the human mind which arise under the laws of patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, unfair competition and related laws. Copyright laws encourage the creation of literary works, computer programs, artistic works, and expressions of national culture1. Intellectual property rights are the legal rights given to creators of intellectual property. Intellectual property rights usually give the creator of intellectual property the right to exclude others from exploiting the creation for a defined period of time. The protection of intellectual property rights contributes significantly to technological progress, competitiveness of businesses and our country's well-being2.

‘IPR’ is the creation of human mind. Potential efforts of human beings lead to intellectual outcomes, which in turn have considerable value in economy. Right associated with intellectual property which gives legal protection is referred to as IPR’3. The copyright is an old concept. We are all aware of the nature of copyright. After the advent of printing and multimedia technology for storage and communication, the concept of copyright has changed and become more complex and important. Librarians and information scientists are deeply concerned with copyright issue as it has direct impact on their work and services such as acquisition, storage, and dissemination of information.

Intellectual property is divided into two categories: first, Industrial Property includes patents for inventions, trademarks, industrial designs and geographical indications. Second, Copyright includes literary works such as novels, poems and plays, films, musical works, artistic works such as drawings, paintings, photographs and sculptures, and architectural designs. Rights related to copyright include those of performing artists in their performances, producers of phonograms, and those of broadcasters in their radio and television programs. Intellectual property rights are like any other property rights – they allow the creator, or owner, of a patent, trademark, or copyright to benefit from his or her own work or investment4.

Copyright:

Copyright is a protection that covers published and unpublished literary, scientific and artistic works, whatever the form of expression, provided such works are fixed in a tangible or material form. This means that if we can see it, hear it and/or touch it - it may be protected. Copyright laws grant the creator the exclusive right to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute, perform and display the work publicly. Exclusive means only the creator of such work, not anybody who has access to it and decides to grab it. Some of the definitions of copyright are given below:

"The ownership of and legal right to control all possible ways of producing a copy of an original piece of work, such as a book, play, film, photograph or piece of music"5.

Copyright is a right, which is available for creating an original literary or dramatic or musical or artistic work. Cinematographic films including sound track and video films and recordings on discs, tapes, perforated roll or other devices are covered by copyrights. Computer programs and software are covered under literary works and are protected in India under

copyrights. The Copyright Act, 1957 as amended in 1983, 1984, 1992, 1994 and 1999 governs the copyright protection in India.

2.1 Copyright History:

The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (Berne Convention- an international agreement governing copyright), was first accepted in Berne, Switzerland in 1886. It required its signatories to recognize the copyright of works of authors from other signatory countries (known as members of the Berne Union) in the same way as it recognises the copyright of its own nationals. It was Indeed a landmark event in the history of copyright. The organisation subsequently relocated to Geneva in 1960, and was succeeded in 1967 with the establishment of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) by treaty as an agency of the United Nations6.

The WIPO Secretariat in 2008 was requested to present on studies commissioned by WIPO on exceptions and limitations for the visually impaired and libraries and archives and was also asked to commission a new study on exceptions and limitations for the benefit of educational activities, including distance education and the trans-border aspect of it. Member countries have asked WIPO to include the subject of exceptions and limitations to copyright and related rights for the purposes of education, libraries and archives, and disabled persons on the agenda of the Committee and to strengthen international understanding of the need to have adequate limitations, learning from existing models and moving towards agreement on exceptions and limitations for public interest purposes, which, like minimum standards, were to be envisaged in all legislation for the benefit of the international community. As a result, copyright exceptions and limitations is an ongoing focus of the work of WIPO’s Copyright Committee in the past and the coming years. All these developments have been due to the result of the demented international copyright regime which is less balanced than it has been at any point in the past7.

First, the range of rights granted to copyright owners expanded. For instance, the 1994 Agreement on Trade- Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) created a new right to control rental of copyrighted works and extended copyright to ‘computer software’.

Second, the length of copyright term has also expanded in recent years. Although the internationally harmonized term is 50 years after the life of the author, many countries have now adopted the higher term of life of author plus 70 years (or in some cases 95 years), as a result of recent bilateral trade agreements with the United States and/or the European Community.

Third, while creating new opportunities for the creation and dissemination of copyrighted works, new developments in information and communication Technologies (ICTs) have challenged the traditional balance embodied in the copyright system. The 1996 WIPO Internet Treaties required signatory countries to provide legal protection to technologies; technological protection measures (TPMs) that can be used by rights holders’ to control access to, and use of, digital copyrighted works. Private rights holders have been able to use legally-enforced TPMs to control the level of access information users can have, and on what terms.

2.2 International Copyrights (WIPO)

In 1886 a meeting was held on international agreement on the copyright issue in Berne Convention. USA opposed this convention and agreed to it in the 1998 convention. The UCC (Universal Copyright Convention) has provided some protection of foreign works as for domestic work and translation rights up to 7 years. The TRIPs (Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights) is the outcome of eight rounds of discussion of GATT (General Agreement and Tariffs and Trade) which was adopted by WTO (World Trade Organisation).

The Berne Convention and the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC) protect our works in countries of which we are not a citizen or national. Under these treaties, the following works may be protected:

Both unpublished and published works of an author who is national

or resident of a country that is a member of these treaties; or

Published works, with permission, of an author who is not a national or resident of a country that is a member of these treaties. In this case a work may be considered simultaneously published in several countries if it has been published in two or more Berne Union countries within 30 days of its first publication.

To benefit from the above protection, there are no formal requirements established in the Berne Convention other than having the author’s name on the work. Under the UCC, a copyright notice is required. This notice should consist of the copyright symbol "©" accompanied by the year of first publication and the name of the copyright owner.

2.3 Violation of Copyright

The real worlds of new technology in Internet reflect well the pleasant side of life as well as evil side of the life. Today the physical shape of books, magazines, newspapers, pictures, images etc have changed to CD, DVD etc. and are providing all the commercial information on Internet. The purpose of all such developments is to generate the income for author of the original work. Obtaining an unauthorized access to any system for modification or deletion or theft of original work of the author is cyber crime or violation of the copyright.

The following are the cyber crime and violation of the copyright act in the Internet age.

1. Hacking

2. Virus attack

3. Spreading misinformation

4. Cutting of communication

5. Violation of privacy

6. Cracking

7. Data fiddling

8. E-mail security destruction

9. Pornography

10. Alteration of information

IT Act, clause 66, defines hacking as "likely to wrongful loss or damages to the public or any person destroy or delete or alter any information residing in a computer resource or diminishes its value or utility or affect it injuriously by any means, commits hacking."8

The copyright notice at the bottom of a website only pertains to the content that one has actually created, not to what was created by another and is being used with permission. Owner’s terms may vary, but it is always best to include text on the same page where the material on loan is being used to specify who the real owner is, and that it is being used with permission.

If anyone translates anyone copyright page into another language, he doesn’t need permission, and he owns the "new" work! The Berne Convention states, "Authors of literary and artistic works protected by this Convention shall enjoy the exclusive right of making and of authorizing the translation of their works throughout the term of protection of their rights in the original works."

Data fiddling is moving the data files, modifying the data and making the unusable database unusable lock system is cyber crime.

Virus attack on the system is a major problem today as anyone who is living is living anywhere can create the virus through any connected system to Internet. A virus attack on a software making company can create a big problem for the customer of that company.

2.4 Duration of Copyright Protection

The duration of copyright is dependent on the type of work in question. Given below are examples of some works.14

Literary, Dramatic, Musical and Artistic Works: The life time of the author plus a period of 70 years from the end of the year in which the author dies.

Computer generated works: 50 years from the date of creation of the work. A work is deemed to be computer generated where there is "no human author".

Sound recordings: 50 years from the end of year in which it was made or published.

Broadcasts– 50 years from the end of the year of broadcast.

Typographical arrangement of published editions: 25 years from the year of first publication.

IPR IN THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT

Digital technologies are coming up very fast. It may be difficult to forecast about the digital technology that will come up in the future. It would be appropriate if the copyright law is modified to address the issues of protection of exclusive rights of the creators as soon as new technology is emerged. Remedial measures in the law with interpretation in a positive manner should provide protection by broad statement, which would cover all aspects of copyright. While making the draft during the amendment in the Act, expert opinion of the specialists in the respective areas should be considered to accommodate implications of emerging technologies on the Act.

Digital technology has created very serious problems to the copyrighted material on one hand and provided many opportunities for its exploitation on the other. Creators are under the grip of fear that digital world would end the protection of their exclusive rights because everybody will copy everything freely and there would be no more creative work. Every time digital technology comes up with methods of better reproduction, the copyists make efforts to free-ride on the labour of others. Policy makers need to come up with solutions to curb this practice by providing stricter measures to curb copyright infringement and protect the rights of the creators.

The following factors have affected the copyright in digitized environment:

Simplification of reproducibility.

Advancement in technology for compression and storage of digital content.

Easy extraction of digital contents from storage media.

Reduction in cost of reproduction.

Easy substitutability of digitized copies.

Easy communication of digital content over Internet.

Inexpensive dissemination of digitized products.

Due to emergence of the consumer electronic devices, computers, satellite communication systems, optical fiber communication and global networks, the process of protection of copyrights has become more complicated. As the cost of reproduction and distribution of creative work in digital form continue to fall, copyrighted material can be made available to the users at a very low marginal cost.

Only cooperation and compromise among the content creators, manufacturers of consumer electronics and other related technologies will help in effective implementation of the copyright protection. Certain things like words, names, titles and slogans, ideas, procedures, processes, systems, principles, discoveries, regardless in the form they have been described, explained, or illustrated are not subject to copyright, but the particular manner in which they are expressed or described may be protected under the copyright law.

Possible Threats to the Intellectual Properties Contained in digital

Resources

There are three major types of attack and three corresponding technical defenses on the intellectual property contained in digital resources on the Internet. These attacks are software tampering, reverse engineering and unauthorized copying.9

Software Tampering

Software tampering remains a threat induced by advancements in Information technology application and products. Many mobile agents and e-commerce application must contain encryption keys or other secret information. Hackers who are able to extract, modify or otherwise tamper with this information can incur significant financial losses to the intellectual property owner. The defense against software tampering is tamper proofing so that unauthorized modification to software (for example to remove a watermark) will result in nonfunctional codes.

Reverse Engineering of Software Products

The Second technique to be considered is reverse engineering. This is a scenario in which a very valuable piece of code is extracted from an application and incorporated into a competitor's code. Such threats have recently become more of a concern since, more and more programs are being distributed in easily decomposable formats rather than in the primitive or native binary codes. Obfuscation, a process that renders software unintelligible but still functional is a defense against reverse engineering.

Piracy

Among the various threats against which digital must be protected, piracy ranks highest in terms of its impact on developments in information technology and the global economic at large. The term "software piracy" covers such activities as the unauthorized copying of resource, counterfeiting and distributing resource illegally. It is important to understand the different resource piracy channels, not just to comply with the law but also to protect against bigger economic problems like lost revenue and lost jobs. The survival of the intellectual properties on the web is paramount to the survival of modern businesses, IT activities and the Internet as a whole. Many users have found themselves caught in the piracy trap, unaware they were doing anything illegal. It is worth explaining ways one can intentionally or unintentionally pirate10.

Unrestricted Client Access

Unrestricted client access piracy occurs when a copy of a digital resource is copied onto an library's servers and the library's network "clients" are allowed to freely access the resource in violation of the terms of the license agreement. This is a violation when the library has a "single instance" license that permits installation of the digital resources onto a single computer, rather than a client-server license that allows concurrent server-based network access to the resource. A violation also occurs when the library has a client-server license; the library is not enforcing user restrictions outlined in the license.

Counterfeiting

Counterfeiting is the duplication and sale of unauthorized copies of resource in such a manner as to try to pass off the illegal copy as if it were a legitimate copy produced or authorized by the legal publisher.

CD-R Piracy

CD-R piracy is the illegal copying of resource using CD-R recording technology. This form of piracy occurs when a person obtains a copy of a resource and makes a copy or copies and redistributes them to friends or for re-sale.

Internet Piracy

Internet piracy is the uploading of commercial resource (i.e., resource that is not freeware or public domain) on to the Internet for anyone to copy or copying commercial resource from any of these services. Internet piracy also includes making available or offering for sale pirated resource over the Internet.

COPYRIGHT PROTECTION TECHNOLOGIES

Besides protecting the rights of the owners of copyrighted material in electronic environment, it is also important that the information concerning the copy protection status of a particular piece of content be conveyed accurately and securely.

4.1 Secure Digital Transmission Copy Protection

In this system, if someone attempts to manipulate the copy protection information, the keys for the content will be altered, and the content itself will become inaccessible. This system has the following advantages:

The information is secured from any outside interference if someone attempts to modify it.

The information is reliable at the receiving end.

The information is convenient because it is the part of the security system itself.

4.2 Digital Signature

In literary terms, signature is defined as the action of signing one’s name, initials or distinctive mark to authenticate the genuineness of a document. In legal terms, signature is a piece of writing by which a person identifies itself in an act and by which the person expresses its approval of the content of the document. In other words, it is a kind of any sign bound to a contract allowing identification and authentication of the document’s signatory and showing the intent to agree to the document’s content. Thus, the role of a signature can be summarised as: expressing intention to be bound to a contract, to identify the parties, and to authenticate the document. Traditional signature can be easily produced and recognized but difficult to forge. It becomes physical component of the document and hence it is difficult to remove without trace.

Digital signature offers secure and trustworthy solutions, authentication and integrity of the document as well as identity of the sender. It is an electronic data attached to or logically associated with other electronic data, and serves as a method of authentication11.

Digital signature can be described by the process of encryption and decryption technology known as cryptography. In this process, information (plain text) is passed through an encryption process to produce an encrypted copy (cipher text) that is further decrypted and restored to the original plain text through the application of the cipher key. The concept behind this is to make the data illegible for everyone else except those specified. In this mechanism information is transformed from one place to the other that only sender and recipient can see. The system is based on application of mathematical keys in symmetric and asymmetric algorithms, known as conventional/symmetric cryptography and asymmetric cryptography12.

Encryption/decryption is a popular means of protecting communication transmitted through a potentially hostile environment such as computer network. Encryption protects the content until it is decrypted at which point it can be copied on to other media. If a person needs to send an electronic copyrighted material to another person, both need to know the secret key in advance. After the receipt of the material, the receiver has to decrypt it using symmetric algorithms to access the original material.

4.3 Digital Watermarking

Watermarking is a technique for impressing a design onto the fibre of the paper during its manufacturing process. It has been well known since the manufacturing of paper was started. In this technique, high pressure is put on wet fibre, through some defined pattern, to expel the moisture and to leave an imprint on the paper. It is known as watermark and can be viewed under transmitted light. It is a part of "Steganography", which literally means "cover writing". "Stega" is a Greek word which means "to cover". Now, the word "watermarking"13, has been replaced with "digital watermarking", because it can be applied to other forms of digital data like text, images, and even sound also. The versatility of digital watermarking technology has attracted intellectual property owners to apply it on their products to secure digital transmission.

Digital watermarking differs from the printed watermarking because it uses naturally occurring variations of text and images, and thus cannot be seen by the user unless special techniques are employed. In case of an image, watermark can be embedded into an electronic image by slightly changing the brightness of some of its pixels in regular or even random patterns. It can also be done in the text by making variations through creating spaces between lines and characters.

Application of digital watermarking include copyright protection, fingerprinting, authentication,. Copy control, tamper detection and data hiding applications such as broadcast monitoring.

Digital watermarking has a number of advantages including copyright protection of electronic copyrighted material on Internet, finding out unauthorized reproduction of images, dissuasion of potential pirates, etc. Though, it does not prevent unauthorized copying, but unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material can be traced or detected. One of the major application of the digital watermarking is to convey the ‘ownership information’.

The watermark may be visible or invisible. The invisible watermarks are embedded in the material together with associated information, e.g., its name, its author, its date, its point of contact, etc. Several inventors have proposed using ownership watermarks to authenticate the material. Most invisible watermarks are designed to be robust; the watermark robustly survives alterations of the watermarked data. Recently, with the advent of digital movies on satellite broadcasts and DVD media, the movie studios have become very interested in watermarking. The application here is to record an invisible, robust, "never copy", "copy once", or "no more copy" watermarks in each movie. Every recording device will be required to detect them, and refuse to record any movie whose mark prohibits copying. In return, the studios would indemnify the recording device manufacturers against contributory copyright infringement suits. The largest advantage of this watermarking application is the independence from the technology, protocol, or format of the distribution. Some of the watermarking technologies have been Described here:

Visible Image Watermarks: It is available with IBM Digital Library. It embeds a visible mark onto a gray or color photographic image. This watermark has several features that distinguish it from other visible watermarking techniques. One constrains the watermarking process to change only the brightness, and not the colour, of the image to be marked this is intended to make the watermark less obtrusive.

Reversible Visible Watermarks: It is developed at the IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory for applications such as online content distribution. Here, the image is marked with a Reversible Visible Watermark before distribution or posting on the Internet, and the watermarked image content serves as a "teaser" that users may view or obtain for free. Then, the watermark can be removed to recreate the unmarked image by using a "vaccine" program.

Fragile Image Watermarks: IBM is investigating multiple techniques for fragile image watermarking that would determine whether an image has been altered since the time when it was watermarked. The targeted applications for this "image authentication" include detection of altered (or replaced) image content within a digital library, and the "secure digital camera."

Robust Image Watermarks: IBM is also investigating multiple techniques for robust image watermarking that would apply watermarks that could later help in identifying the owner or recipient of an image. This technique requires an image-specific watermark key to extract the watermark from the watermarked image. This makes it more difficult for a malicious party to detect or estimate the watermark (which could lead to it being removed to delete evidence of ownership).

In the digital environment new forms of information are invented by using digital technologies, new art forms are emerging like animation and computer music new forms of scientific visualization and new sorts of cybernetic social spaces. In this environment all over the world the owner of the copyright of the intellectual work are confronted and exploited. The copy right law which was enacted in printing era by and large being forced on the existing digital environment, there is a need to modify IPR by which the creators can hold the exclusive right on their work of exploit. Due to the development of digital technology and communication technology, the information are crossing the borders very rapidly, the impact of domestic copyright laws has become muted. To overcome this serious problem of IP in the electronic environment, different nations are trying to protect the copy right by laws to the authors of original work.

Conclusion:

Protection and exploitation of Intellectual Property (IP) are becoming more and more critically important around this global village. In the present digital environment scenario librarian or the information specialists have an important role in protecting the rights of patent holders. The first and foremost duty of the librarian to keep himself aware with the latest changes in IPR and to oversee their proper implementation while purchasing books and other materials and also when these are used in the library. The Librarians/ information officers should keep themselves aware with latest changes in the Intellectual Property Right and Information Technology Act and their implementation. It is an obligation of the Librarian to keep the user aware about copyright.