Copyright Management and Control Systems: Pre-Infringement

Pre-infringement copyright management and control systems that inhibit or control infringement of intellectual property may be put into place by copyright owners before distributing their works. Examples are:

Contracts

Contracts are a pre-infringement control method, which very often is underestimated. Properly formed contracts enable copyright holders to restrict the use of their works in excess of the rights granted under copyright laws.

Copy Protection

This approach was standard in the 1980s, but rejected by consumers and relatively easy to break. Still copy protection, whereby the vendor limits the number of times a file can be copied, is used in certain situations.

Limited Functionality

This method allows copyright owners to provide a copy of the work, which is functionally limited. Software creators, for example, can distribute software that cannot print or save. A fully functional version has to be bought from the vendor.

Date Bombs

Here the intellectual property holder distributes a fully functional copy but locks off access at a pre-specified date or after a certain number of uses.

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Internet services

The Internet can be used in in different ways: for distributing and retrieving information, for one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many communication, and for the access services. Accordingly, there are different services on offer. The most important of these are listed below.

Telnet

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

Electronic Messaging (E-Mail)

World Wide Web (WWW)

Bulletin Board Systems (BBS)

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)

Internet Relay Chat (IRC)

Multiple User Dimensions (MUDs)

Gopher

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Louis Braille

b. Jan. 4, 1809, Coupvray, near Paris, France
d. Jan. 6, 1852, Paris, France

Educator who developed a system of printing and writing that is extensively used by the blind and that was named for him. Himself blind Braille became interested in a system of writing, exhibited at the school by Charles Barbier, in which a message coded in dots was embossed on cardboard. When he was 15, he worked out an adaptation, written with a simple instrument, that met the needs of the sightless. He later took this system, which consists of a six-dot code in various combinations, and adapted it to musical notation. He published treatises on his type system in 1829 and 1837.

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DMCA

The DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) was signed into law by U.S. President Clinton in 1998 and implements the two 1996 WIPO treaties (WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty and WIPO Copyright Treaty). Besides other issues the DMCA addresses the influence of new technologies on traditional copyright. Of special interest in the context of the digitalization of intellectual property are the titles no. 2, which refers to the limitation on the liability of online service providers for copyright infringement (when certain conditions are met), no. 3, that creates an exemption for making a copy of a computer program in case of maintenance and repair, and no. 4 which is concerned with the status of libraries and webcasting. The DCMA has been widely criticized for giving copyright-holders even more power and damage the rights and freedom of consumers, technological innovation, and the free market for information.

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skytale

The skytale (pronunciation: ski-ta-le) was a Spartan tool for encryption. It consisted of a piece of wood and a leather-strip. Any communicating party needed exactly the same size wooden stick. The secret message was written on the leather-strip that was wound around the wood, unwound again and sent to the recipient by a messenger. The recipient would rewound the leather and by doing this enciphering the message.

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