Digital Rights Management: Towards a Balance between Copyright Rights and Fair Use Exceptions.

摘要

There have been several attempts pointing towards DRM schemes that better satisfy Fair Use requirements [1, 2, 3, 4]; this project explores a new approach. Based on the idealistic premise that by mimicking the physical properties that prevented piracy in the pre-MP3 world into a post-MP3 world DRM scheme it should be possible to establish a copyright infringement control paradigm that is acceptable to all; this project establishes a Fair Use friendly DRM Scheme.It has been found that for a DRM scheme to be Fair Use friendly it has to aim to reach the following idealistic characteristics:*The copyright holders should not be able to interfere with usage which a judge would or could rule as fair use.*The Consumers would be able to consume the content easily and spontaneously within interoperable regimes.*The Consumers? privacy rights would be respected, in congruence with the legislation in question.*The Consumers should be able to purchase, replicate and distribute music at a monetary cost.*The Consumers should be able to replicate, distribute and store music at the cost of diminished quality, slow replication and slow distribution.However it has also been found that these characteristics alone are not enough, and therefore the DRM scheme should be implemented within the following conditions:*The DRM scheme should find ways to handle the ambiguity of Fair Use.*The DRM scheme should facilitate ex-post tracking and monitoring rather than ex-ante based decision making.*The DRM scheme should support interoperability and privacy.An example of how these properties can be implemented has been designed.