Digital rights management for publishing scanned documents on the internet

摘要

While documents which may be subject to existing copyrights are scanned to form electronically transmissible files, information is extracted from the copyright notice, supplemented by manual or automated research and processed by performing calculations of critical dates for geographical areas of interest preferably provided from memory as a table of algorithms to determine if the document is in the public domain or if a license for electronic distribution can be obtained. Automated generation and/or transmission of license requests is also provided. Deletion of electronic files from local storage for particular areas and identifiers thereof form indices for particular areas are also provided if a license for electronic distribution of particular documents is not obtained.