On the Road Again
January 24, 2006
I am off to New York for a client visit again. Next week I will be off to Denver to speak at meeting, the Standards Publishing Advisory Board. I will be speaking about DRM, and the theme will be, “Educate or Enforce?” which I think is the right question to ask. Standards bodies, like ISO and ASTM, have an interesting set of issues around DRM. Their standards are their reason for being, to begin with, and often are their primary source of revenue. The standards also, of course, represent a wonderful collection of intellectual effort and property.
At the same time, standards bodies are facing increasing pressure to conduct their business in as open and transparent a means as possible. So how to balance the need to protect intellectual property with the need for openness and transparency? It’s a good question, and one I plan to answer next week. I will post my slides after the talk.
My perspective for this audience is heavily influenced by ASTM. I have worked with their publishing and IT folks for a long time, and, on the matter of DRM, they keep arriving at a really firm “maybe.” Yet they do some other very clever things, including watermarking, and they continue to think long and hard about this.
I also think the standards groups have an interesting issue around DRM and the entire lifecycle of these documents. What about DRM for the standards as work in progress, when transparency is important but the content still needs to be protected? What about DRM when the standard goes out of date? With standards bodies, a member may have complex rights associated with a given standard—they may be an author of the work in progress who has also purchased the current standard. And so on. Not to make this crazily complicated, but I think this audience has DRM issues well beyond the simpler question of protection of finished goods.
Posted by Bill Trippe at January 24, 2006 4:29 PM
