Reading Anonymously The Digital Works

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Abstract

The access to material that is protected under copyright without revealing the reader’s information is reading anonymously. All without paying any royalty to copyright holder, and downloading such material as well read the material available on internet. The management of the material is difficult when persons have such access. The laws in this regard have be to be more stringent and should take note of the fact that people "tend" to benefit from other’s works, by anonymously copying. The government needs to take into account that the technological development has made the access to the work cheaper, but also, more prone to infringement. The management of the intellectual property is of paramount importance for both the copyright holder as well as the State.

Introduction

In the age of information and technology, the people have access to information, and limitless resources available in the cyberspace. With various constitution validating the access of information as a right vesting in the citizens, laws protecting them come in conflict with the constitutional right, there is a constant struggle between the two. In the U.S. the right to read anonymously is read into the free speech of the people, this right was affirmed in the case Stanley v. Georgia [1] where it was seen that persons have the right to access information, unchecked. It was held that people have no obligation to identify themselves before accessing the information available on internet and ‘anonymity’ was interpreted was a part of ‘right to privacy’ of an individual. Then again under the WIPO Copyright Treaty (WTC) two distinct issues have been recognized such as – (a) the profound impact of the development and convergence of information and communication technologies on the creation and use of literary and artistic works [2] , and (b) the need to maintain a balance between the rights of authors and the larger public interest, particularly education, research and access to information, as reflected in the Berne Convention [3] .

An apparent conflict can be brought out, where individuals need to be given access to information, but without the violation of other individuals’ property rights over his work being infringed, when it is available on the cyberspace. This Article focuses specifically on monitoring the reading habits of individuals for the purpose of "copyright management of literary works" in cyberspace, and special reference to Google books litigation. The article would bring out the technological safeguards that have utilized and the problems pertaining with such system and the constant endeavor of the State to protect from piracy, and combat – online infringement and counterfeiting acts. Furthermore, talk of the peoples’ right to read anonymously, and the need to balance it.

Reading Anonymously The Digital Works

Reading anonymously is accessing information without disclosing one’s identity in any manner. People assimilate not only information of public nature but also, the ones’ that have been protected under the copyrights act. If such information is that of a public body, every person has a right to access it; as in most countries, the "freedom to information" by the citizenry in the matter of public office is recognized through legislation or through judicial pronouncements. But, information that being a work of an individual, or individuals, is protected as "literary work" of the person, or persons, as they have expressed a certain idea in a written manner; that work being an original work is protected.

Today, information being a ‘commodity’ is for research work, and publications are made of such works in diverse subject field, which has led to a pool of information available to people. The compilation of one’s research work into piece of write-up, article, or expressed in any manner whether he publishes it or not, the author of such work has a copyright over such ‘literary work’ by the Copyright Act, 1957. In the aforesaid act, literary works is defined as ‘includes computer programmes, tables and compilations including computer databases’ [4] . ‘Literary Work’ is also recognized under the Berne Convention (1971) as - ‘include every production in the literary, scientific and artistic domain, whatever may be the mode or form of its expression, such as books, pamphlets and other writings; lectures, addresses, sermons and other works of the same nature’ [5] , which is an accepted meaning in India through various judicial decisions.

With the growth of the technology, the literary work is stored, retrieved and disseminated in various formats other than that of a tangible character. All material, content and information that can be represented in some virtual manner are capable of being recorded in digital code. In a discussion of virtual reality Mille noted – "the digitalisation of representations of any nature has made all kinds of shapes, colours, lights, odours, temperatures and almost any expression of reality susceptible of being recorded, stored, processed, reproduced, and transmitted by computer means" [6] .

Initially, the CD-ROM technology becomes a popular storage and retrieval mechanism, which protected the author’s right through a number of licensing agreements between the buyer and the company digitalizing such work. The growing electronic publications including e-books, e-journals and the billions of web pages and peta-bytes of information on Internet have had a profound impact on the knowledge society. However, with open digital libraries and the sharing of such material available in library, dilutes the author’s rights over his work. There was a popular belief of making the digitalized work accessible to the members or subscriber of such library only, and measures such as disabling download, copying, saving such material, in any manner is restricted by the server, is a manner of protection given by such libraries. In the recent years there websites where file sharing is encouraged between individuals, even the materials that is copyrighted, they are not only in downloadable formats as well as not protected from copying by unknown users. File-sharing is one of the most common and a vastly damaging method to dilute the copyright. Due lack of technological safeguards to monitor live transfer or ftp transfer, such material cannot be restricted.

In the next part of the article, the effect of digitalization of books by Google would be brought out. The books and material available on Google, makes any book in the English language text-searchable, and for which Google has to scan through the entire book or material, and identify the text requested by the user, which trespasses the rights on numerous persons.

Reading Google Books

The Google Library Project has digitalized has created an ocean of material and books available to a large group of individuals, to view such material. Google has to scan the text of each such book – and scanning means making a copy and whose rights are being entitled to different persons around the world which may counts to millions, which is quite impossible to access. So when the company failed to get permission from all the copyright owners, it has given two options to the authors either to expressly opt-out of the copyright or agreed to it by the result of a class action litigation. Where as in both the circumstances the user of the copyright has the right to exploit, without authorization, unless the copyright holder take affirmative action. It is the essence of opt-in system in copyright which reared its head once more along with this controversy. [7] 

In total, Google plans to add more than 17 million library volumes to its electronic index at an estimated cost of $10 per book, or $170 million. As payment for access to the books, Google will provide the libraries with an electronic copy of the works they contributed to the project. [8] Even now the bibliography and some snippets of the book is viewable without paying, and the entire document is printable if you are subscribe to the digital library. The books that are scanned have a bundle of copyrights like that of the publisher and the authors’. If the book lacks the permission of either such parties, the book being available on internet would violate their right.

The Google had faced the problem when the Authors Guild in US filed a case against Google to stop such digitalization of books, as the authors’ of many such books did not authorize such publication of their books, this claim also included publishers as it affected their economic rights over those books.

The court held it was justified to the extent were the books had already become a part of the public domain, and were fully browsing on the internet and even download the same. Once the Settlement is implemented, Google's use of its digitized books will change. Google plans to sell books, or portions of books, that are featured in Google Books to individual users. [9] It also plans to launch a service for institutional subscribers to have unlimited access to Google's book database. [10] Beyond this commercial use of its digitized books, Google intends to perform non-consumptional research by gathering large amounts of data from its digitized books at once, while the researcher performing the task does not read the books. Non-consumptional research may include automatic translation, indexing and searching, or linguistic analysis. [11] 

The Google Library Project now ensure if any copyrighted material was in use the publisher’s authorization and the author’s authorization is take before allowing it to be view by the public, furthermore if disallowed by either only a part of such work is allowed to be viewed. Steps like digital imaging of the books and the books to be in PDF format alone with various restrictions such as disallowing – commenting, copying, and assembling of such document. This has not prevented the persons to access the book, as the sections of the book are searchable and selectively accessible to all persons.

Effect On The Copyright Holder

Due to the character and nature of digital content, copyright and other legal regimes struggle to regulate its use and exploitation. Digital material is inexpensive to work with and is easily manipulated, stored, copied and transported. Further it leaves minimal records and fundamentally challenges our economic notions of value and price. Publishers have difficulty in agreeing to any license for the distribution in electronic form material for which they hold the copyright. There are two major reasons stated for their concern. The first is the worry that the material will be copied and/or re-disseminated in an unauthorized manner, and therefore, by implication, the publishers will lose sales. The second concern is that material will be amended and will then be passed off as new material, and it will be difficult to demonstrate that the material had originated from that material that the publisher owned rights to.

Due to common formats emerging for the storage, manipulation and transfer of digital material, keeping a check on the flow of information is difficult. Boundaries of language, geography and proprietary technologies are being stripped away in the digital domain. [12] There are serious issues for the application of copyright in this context. Angela Bowne comments, "The digitization of intellectual property enables it to be used in many different media, to be copied at the same quality as an original, to be manipulated and distorted, and to be distributed throughout the world cheaply, easily and speedily." [13] 

Legislations

The protection of the copyright-holders right from piracy and unfair access US has had stringent and specific law with regard to the same. In India the protection is generally available in the Indian Copyright Act and Information Technology Act; there is no specific law to prevent the same.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act reinforces these arguments by barring circumvention of access control technologies, and by forbidding the manufacture and distribution of circumvention tools. Under this act in the US, content providers are developing persistent access controls capable of metering and imposing a fractional fee for each act of access and use. [14] When these technologies are in place, "access" will refer not only to the initial act of authorized access (as with a book that one has purchased), but also to each subsequent rendering of the content.

In India, there is no such protection to the content given, moreover the Information Technology Act, 2000, only prohibits the transmission of the act, but cannot prevent or regulate the copyrighted material that is available on the cyberspace.

Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act

The persons who have access to the entire book as the members of the digital library, the books are downloadable, and the same are made available at various forums, to combat this form of piracy the US Federal State had had proposed two legislative bills – Stop Online Piracy Act (hereinafter called as ‘SOPA’) and Protect IP Act (hereinafter called as ‘PIPA’). Both the legislations Provisions include the requesting of court orders to bar advertising networks and payment facilities from conducting business with infringing websites, and search engines from linking to the sites, and court orders requiring Internet service providers to block access to the sites. The law would expand existing criminal laws to include unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content, imposing a maximum penalty of five years in prison.

Copyright Management Technologies

Digital Rights Management (DRM) Systems operate as ‘electronic fences’, which can be used to control a digital work. [15] They have become prominent in the digital era as copyright owners have attempted to control access to and uses of their works through technological measures such as encryption. [16] Encryption of the content is done to ensure that only consumers with appropriate keys can access the content as well as monitor the content remains unchanged throughout the process. Two well-known technologies used to carry out this function are passwords and cryptography. [17] 

Technologies have been developed to protect the content through watermarking, finger printing and tamper proof hardware and software; access control by user ID and password; content use through disabling printing and downloading, copying specified number of times only and restricting copying through master copies only.

Document Image Processing

One type is software incorporated into word processing, computer typesetting, and DTP softwares, as well as Document Image Processing equipment. This type of ECMS would automatically tag the document in a tamper proof fashion.

Encryption

Encryption is the process of scrambling information embedded within a digital object so that it cannot be used without a password or a unique key. There are two possible encryption schemes are private key (Symmetric) cryptography and public key (Asymmetric) cryptography.

Symmetric encryption is the most secure and requires both parties to know a private key in order to engage in a secured message exchange. Public key cryptography involves the use of a pair of keys-a public key and a private key. The public key may be widely distributed, even to unknown users, but only its owner knows the private key.

Watermarking

Digital watermarking is a communication method, in which the author information known as watermark (author name, date, time, logo, fingerprint etc.) is embedded directly or imperceptibly into the digital data (called original data or host data may be images, videos, graphics and audio) to make the watermarked data. Digital watermarking embeds the information into data, and can be either visible or invisible. It helps to reduce the likelihood that someone will pass it on or try to make illegal copies.

License

License containing usage rules to decide what conditions must be met for access and how the consumer can use the resource. A license may be combined with the content into a single package or distributed separately from the content, with key pairs used to bind content to license. Cryptographic techniques also allow copyright owners to control subsequent uses of digitized works

Problems With DRM

The major problem in a digital library environment is the difficulty of providing rights violations when they occur. The regularity steps like cryptographic techniques, authentication of users and limits to their access. Watermarks are not complete DRM mechanisms in their own right. stronger degree of protection can be created with a centralized source of access to copyrighted material. Major copyright interests are attempting to outlaw new peer-to-peer networking technologies that might allow network users to locate and exchange content without centralized directory systems and servers.

At one level, this is no more than what many online database suppliers like Westlaw and Lexisnexis offer: the material itself is not "sold" or distributed; rather "access" to the information is sold. The user must enter a contractual relationship with the seller; passwords are issued to authorized users only; the entire database is either too big or is technically restricted in such a way that an authorized user cannot obtain more than a small portion of it at any one time. Even the Google library gives unlimited access to all its digitalized material to the institutional users.

There are loopholes in encryption of the material, as the subscribed user generally tends to share the information with others through file sharing. The digital imaging and watermarks can be used in books can be removed through software.

Recommendation And Conclusion

According to Copyright Act 1957, copyright is a negative [18] monopoly right which enables author of the work to prevent others to exercise that right which has been conferred on him. What an author creates he is an exclusive owner of that. The precise text to determine whether a person is entitled to copyright is to ascertain whether "skill, judgment and experience or labour, and capital has been expended in creating the work" [19] . But, this right and the right to access information have to be balanced with one another, digitalized format being a cheaper affair one can afford it.

In the view of ‘fair use’ of the material, copying of the digital material anything less than 10% of the original length is acceptable for the educational purpose. There is a clear need for the development of robust, reliable, economic and tamper-proof mechanisms to identify, or tag, copyright material and/or to control the usage of such material. The copyright management technologies need to be developed to prevent the misuse of the material made available on the internet. The digital libraries can still make provisions for restricting the access to the material available with them, or at least limit the access to copy such material.

The right vested in the people to access information is not an absolute right. It ends when the right of an individual over his "work" begins. Protecting the right of the individual has become more complex as barring the access of it is next to impossible, when it is available in the internet, making "it" available at all points of the globe. The need to develop technology to protect the digitalized material is even more essential to protect the access or alteration to the electronic material without authority.