Two new documents and one news story outline the potential problems of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies, particularly to public information.

• Trusted Computing and Digital Rights Management Principles & Policies, New Zealand State Services Commission (September 2006, Version 1.0).
• Government should use DRM sparingly by Robert Gellman, Government Computer News (10/09/06).
• Evaluating DRM: Building a Marketplace for the Convergent World, The Center for Democracy and Technology (September 2006 – Version 1.0).

The New Zealand Government Principles and Policies document defines DRM this way.

"Digital rights management (DRM) is a set of technologies designed to apply and enforce persistent access restrictions to digital information, as specified by the information provider. Digital rights management can regulate the types of actions that can be done with information (for example, view, print, copy or modify) and the time frame in which that information remains accessible."

The New Zealand principles and policies were developed "in anticipation of the growing usage of trusted computing and digital rights management technologies. The aim of the principles and policies is to ensure that the use of trusted computing and digital rights management technologies does not adversely affect the integrity (including availability and confidentiality) of government-held information or related government systems."

Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies when applied to any content can limit access, prevent or limit use, endanger privacy, and make preservation and long term access difficult or impossible. When applied to government information, it can endanger citizen access to and use of public information and thus should be avoided. As governments increasingly use digital technologies as the only method of distribution of public information, there is a growing potential for use of DRM for a variety of reasons deemed legitimate by information distributors. When DRM technologies are used, even if the intended use is benign, the technology can impose unintended restrictions.

The Center for Democracy and Technology addresses DRM technology issues in general. Robert Gellman puts these two documents in context and comments on them.

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In our continuing our series of reminders that FGI is more than the FGI blog, we call your attention to the information and commentary we brought together about the Depository Library Council Vision. There you will find links to Daniel's comments on the four sections of the draft vision, a reprint of a comment by jajacobs on the "non-exclusive environment" and comments and suggestions from Jim Jacobs, James Jacobs and Shinjoung Yeo that were originally posted on the FGI blog. We will be providing new comments on the paper, Knowledge Will Forever Govern, the final version of the Depository Library Council vision paper. Watch for it here. Continue reading →

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This week FGI volunteers started a new feature, a news aggregator. We have loaded up a lot of news feeds from online magazines, blogs and a few from the Government Printing Office and brought them together in one place for you to read them. Just look for the "news aggregator" link on the left hand side of the home page. (Note from Jim: you can also access the aggregator by clicking on "In other news..." in the top toolbar!) The news aggregator gives you the option of reading all the sources we at FGI find useful, or reading just ones from these four catagories:

• Government Documents Blogs
• Government Technology
• Information focused government blog
• Organizations of interest to FGI

This feature is very much in beta, so please check it out and offer us feedback and new sources, particularly blogs done by government document departments or librarians. If different categories would help, let us know that too. Help us build a more useful tool. If you haven't tried a news/feed reader before, our news aggregator will give you a taste of what it's like. And if you're already a feed subscriber through Bloglines or some other RSS reader, then you might want to look at our list of sources and add news feeds individually. Continue reading →

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While not squarely on the topic of government information, I think this new article on Open Educational Resources will be of interest to FGI readers and government policymakers: Title: THE PROMISE OF OPEN EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES. Authors: Smith, Marshall S. and Casserly, Catherine M. Source: Change; Sep/Oct2006, Vol. 38 Issue 5, p8-17, 10p If you have a subscription to the service, you can access the completed article on EBSCOhost. If you don't have a subscription to EBSCOhost, you can read a Creative Commons licensed preprint produced by the authors. All quotes from the article will be from the preprint. The main thing that struck me about this article was its discussion of the market for educational materials (lectures, syllabyi, etc) and how similar it sounded to the situation for government information:

Many prestigious American universities originally applied a capitalist model to the Web, imagining that they would make a great deal of money by selling some part of their knowledge through Internet-based delivery systems. By 2001 this idea had foundered in the face of market realities. With the specter of riches growing dim, there emerged substantial support among academics for using the Web to provide open access to educational materials. After all, most published professors know that they are not going to become rich on their royalties, that their books and articles will probably be out of print within five years, and that academic progress is nourished by the free flow of information. And most faculty, proud of their work and wanting to share it, provide links to their scholarship on their own Websites. So MIT boldly changed the model: in late 2001, it announced its OpenCourseWare initiative, an ambitious project to share with the world the content of its courses. Access to knowledge and the capacity to use it are critical to both individual and collective prosperity in a world of knowledge economies and global interdependence. In The Future of Ideas Larry Lessig argues that if some have access to the wealth of information on the Web while others do not, creativity will be constrained and inequalities heightened. And that argument does not simply apply to the widening economic gap between the developing and developed world. We only have to compare the resources of the libraries and laboratories of the top twenty universities in the United States with the thousands of colleges and universities that are among them to see such inequalities here at home.

Doesn't the first paragraph remind you of the Government Printing Office's first attempt to sell electronic information back in the early 1990s? And perhaps the second paragraph reminds of the differing levels of access that people have to information produced by their government? The article also contains examples of the benefits of full open access. In its most dramatic example:

Finally, we hear stories about people and organizations that are in the business of selling content but who also place their content on the Web for open access. Then, instead of destroying their market, the free access increases their sales and revenue. In one example, after the South African Human Sciences Research Council Press (HRSC) embraced open content publishing and made many product freely available online, print sales increased over 300 percent. Other less dramatic examples abound.

This article is a good example of what we document librarians can learn by seeing what people in other fields are doing. Its something we should do more often. It is also an example of how progress isn't always served by a strictly free-market model. That is something that GPO and Congress should consider in providing future access to government information. People wishing to know more about Open Educational Resources in general should visit the researcher's web site. Continue reading →

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