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By: Nicholas Bentley	Feedback

Glossary, Biography, and References

Basic use – Basic rights

I am not sure if there is a legal term for this type of use or a definition in copyright law but what I see as ‘basic use’ is the personal use and only the personal use of a product by someone who has purchased a legal copy. For example, read an electronic book, show the film, or play the music. It does not include any rights to use the product commercially or in public or to reuse or resell the product. Any additional rights would have to be negotiated separately.

Clark Andy.

Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science

Natural Born Cyborgs? by Andy Clark

CMS

Dawkins Richard

The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press 1976, ISBN 0-19-286092-5.

Memes – Page 192.
ESS and reciprocal altruism – Page 183.

Digital Product

A digital manifestation of an intellectual creation.(See Product)

DOI

Digital Object Identifier developed by the International DOI Foundation. The DIO is an opaque string which provides a persistent identifier of intellectual property enterties.

DIPR

Distributed Intellectual Property Rights – A system for identifying copy rights in complex electronic environments (the subject of this paper).

Easier

Quicker, cheaper, no forms, no shops, the thing to do, instant gratification…..

ECMS

Electronic Copyright Management System. See WIPO document Electronic Rights Management and Digital Identifier Systems (acmc1_1.doc) for an overview of ECMS.

Handle System

The Handle System technology, developed by the CNRI, provides a global name service for digital objects. For full details see http://www.handle.net/

Memes

See Richard Dawkins for original definition.
In this discussion I relate Memes to a creative piece of work or intellectual property. Any one meme could have many different manifestations and there can be multiple copies of any particular manifestation especially when we are considering digital manifestations.

Micropayments

For more information on micropayments see w3.org/ECommerce. For an interesting discussion on micropayment systems see an article by Brad Templeton entitled 'Microrefunds and the "Don't Pay" button'

Minimum copying rights

For a digital object to exist in en electronic environment it needs, at least, one electronic image of itself and probably many images to be a viable entity. A digital object under the DIPR system is given ‘minimum copying rights’ which allow it to be copied as many times as is necessary to make it available to the legal user.

Physical Product

A physical item incorporating a manifestation of an intellectual creation. Note that a CD or DVD is an example of a physical product but they also contain a digital product and can be treated as a digital product in the DIPR system.

Product

A manifestation of an intellectual creation which in many cases will be a work in the literary or artistic domain which is protected by copyright.

Property Rights Descriptor (PRD)

A structured collection of identifying information add to any digital product. This information would include, at a minimum, Rights and Licence Office identifiers. The PRD field could be extended to include product identification, a product description, and any other useful information. The collected ID fields would provide a unique identification for an item of digital information which would allow the creator to be identified if they wish and the user of the information to demonstrate their rights to use it.

See Structure of the Property Rights Descriptors for more detailed information and proposed structures of the identification fields.

SDMI

Secure Digital Music Initiative

Signature Check

A random sample, or samples, of the original product compared with the copy being checked. The samples should be sufficiently large to confirm that the two copies are statistically likely to be the same product without comparing the whole product.

User

Any person or organisation which is benefiting from a product. (e.g. listening to music, gaining information or pleasure from a text, having a software product work for them,…)