b.cognosco

Part one of a two-part excerpt from a recent work on digital rights management. The book, Digital Rights Management: Business and Technology by Bill Rosenblatt, Bill Trippe, and Stephen Mooney, was published at the end of last year. I've not read it, my only exposure being the excerpt linked here.

The excerpt presents a reasonably broad view of the DRM situation and makes some good points. But I take issue with the authors' treatment of DMCA and the Digital Signatures Act as just "a couple of new laws".

Digital Rights Management: A primer
Excerpt from the comprehensive new book by industry experts
[...]We take a broad view of the meaning and scope of DRM. When you create content (information), you inherently control a set of rights to that content--to see it, change it, print it, play it, copy it, excerpt it, translate it into another language, and so on. Traditionally, those rights have accrued from three sources:
--Legal: Rights that you get either automatically under law (such as inherent copyright) or by some legal procedure (such as applying for a patent)
-- Transactional: Rights that you get or give up by buying or selling them, such as buying a book or selling a manuscript to a publisher
--Implicit: Rights defined by the medium that the information is in
The most important thing to remember about DRM is that the first two sources of rights haven't changed much with the advent of technologies such as the Internet, cell phones, and MP3 files. Various parties have called for a complete gutting and replacement of the standing intellectual property (IP) law, but this hasn't happened and isn't going to. As discussed in Chapter 3 of this book, legislators have responded to new technologies by adding a couple of new laws instead, such as the Electronic Signatures Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.[...] [ Source: PDFZone]

Perhaps this excerpt takes the position out of context, and Chapter Three covers the far-reaching implications of DMCA more thoroughly, and more fairly. If anyone has read the full book I'd be interested in your opinion.