Commercialization of Electronic Information

摘要

Information dissemination is slowly moving from printed media to electronic media. However this step cannot be completed if the electronic commercialization of information does not provide the same guarantees against copyright infringement as with the printed media. In this paper we present the major requirement for the commercialization of electronic information and describe Hep, an agent-based framework we developed for the commercialization of arbitrary electronic documents over open networks. The Hep electronic document commercialization modelfollows the secure content encapsulation model and regards documents as programs (agents) that need to be executed in order to reveal their contents. This way the document provider can include arbitrary checks and controls against possible copyright infringement attempts.