Electronic publishing and copyright

Citation

Deschamps, C. (2000), "Electronic publishing and copyright", Interlending & Document Supply, Vol. 28 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/ilds.2000.12228daa.001

Electronic publishing and copyright

Christine Deschamps is President of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), The Hague, The Netherlands.

Electronic publishing and copyright

"Science is nothing if not communicated to others", said Federico Mayor, the former director of Unesco. It is true that without the regular interchange of ideas, there can be no development of scientific thought, nor advancement of research. The transmission of ideas and knowledge is one of the most fundamental human needs. The principal objective of a librarian is to transmit information and make documents available. What is clear now is that the new technologies hold out the promise of rapid dissemination of information and interaction with users in ways never imagined within the context of traditional printing. There are, however, many unanswered questions and issues to be addressed not least of which are those concerning the copyright of electronically transmitted material. Cyberspace is an immense territory without rules and laws.

Three things are evident:

1. 1.

   The drive to make all information systems interoperable, including those related to protection, control and presentation, is gathering momentum.

2. 2.

   Chosen tools and standards must be capable of universal use.

3. 3.

   The various systems must provide a degree of data protection and authentication, and ensure copyright payment, according to the laws of each country.

One of the main issues is how to win agreement to cross-industry use of a particular protocol: how to choose and standardise a uniform data identification system and thereby provide the transactional heart for a highly granular, truly global, networked multimedia information economy. There are currently many standardised identification numbering systems used by librarians as well as publishers: ISBN, ISSN are well known, but also SICI and BICI for component parts of serials and books, as well as ISRC, ISAN, ISWC for audio visual and conceptual data, DOI and URN for digital documents, and the derived applications like EAN, EDItEUR, and INDECS are trying to define and organise copying activities and related fees.

It seems probable that, for the foreseeable future, systems will be required that provide a unifying transactional heart (often called metadata), by translating and co-ordinating disparate industry-based information and rights management systems into a common code. Even arriving at a definition for that common code will not, however, be possible without the active participation of all the affected industries, including libraries and document supply centres. The link with electronic commerce is of the highest importance to us all.

An effective rights clearance infrastructure will ensure not only that material distributed over the global network will earn a fair return for its owners, but also that society as a whole (e.g. the library end-users) can benefit from wider and faster availability of new and existing forms of material. Librarians and publishers must come together to monitor both access and use.

Generally speaking, intellectual property is made available to the public so that it can be used, and mechanisms which simply prevent use eventually defeat the very reason for which the material was created at all. But the transition of copyright into the digital era is not as smooth as the adaptation to other new technologies have been in the past. This is probably due to the fact that digitisation does not just create a new category of protectable subject matter, nor does networking mean just another way of distributing protected works. Rather, digitisation affects the whole body of protected works, and networking fundamentally alters the traditional means of creating, distributing and using both existing and newly-created subject matter protected by copyright.

In the new system, the exact content of protected works and the composition of any given set of data or information, which in a printed environment were pre-defined by the author of the work, will in a data highway environment be determined increasingly by the user.

Libraries also have an essential role to play in this field. It is going to be one of the critical activities for their future existence. We are living in a very exciting and motivating time, and IFLA, as the representative of all libraries, will work very hard in helping them to meet this challenge, and achieve better access to information in the third millennium

Christine Deschamps