ACADEMIC CONTEXT AND RIGHTS ENFORCEMENT ON KNOWLEDGE BASED CONTENT

Knowledge production takes new and different forms in digital word giving a rising of intellectual property concerns. The purpose of copyright is to protect the interest of creators of intellectual property (IP) deriving revenue/award from their efforts, creating incentives to motivate the continuous production of new IP to their own benefit and the society benefit. Therefore any successful solution to protect the rights and interests of creators must uphold and enforce the fundamental principles of copyright laws. Creators, producers, editors, distributors, consumers and society in general are the main actors in this process and any solution implemented to protect content must attend their needs. This way is possible to safeguard the IP owner interests, ensure that IP is easily accessible and efficiently distributed, and further safeguard the interests of the overall society. This requires not just technology, no matter how it is sophisticated, but also that the distribution system is both credible and trustworthy. In consequence, there is a need for a system flexible and effective enough to prevent and inhibit the unauthorized access and use of digital assets and also capable to manage, monitor, control, secure and track the access and usage respecting privacy and private/fair use.
Authors and learning resource providers are mainly concerned with unauthorized use and modification of learning resources. To protect rights owners over knowledge based content many techniques can be used to detect and avoid IP rights infringement. Which particular technique is adopted depends on the used context an must be analyzed through an assessment of the associated risk level on the distribution and usage of the content in question in the context of the business model. But in the educational context exist a “doctrine” to share and reuse content under a copyright exception: “fair use” (in USA ) or “fair dealing” in Europe. This makes an enormous difference and shapes the educational field in a different manner from other sectors because applying some of technologies can difficult content reutilization and this is one characteristic that boost knowledge spread at universities.
At academic institutions the most basic right which most people wants to preserve is the right of attribution. And to preserve that when other people reuses content we must do one thing: references to the original author by citation him. So the moral right of attribution is the minimum to observe. But how to protect this minimum right in a persistent way to assure and give trust to rights owner. Obviously we must do that not only under the umbrella law but also applying Technological Protection Measures (TPM’s) under a properly rights management system.
In this paper, the most important issues concerning intellectual property and the factors that affect open access movement and the rights protection and management approach are presented and discussed. Here we will focus mainly on how we can preserve the attribution right over eContent on the educational field applying some technological protection measures. Indeed we will describe the steps involved on knowledge content creation, types of content, actors, content lifecycle and interactions between actors and rights when content flows. Also are described some possible threats over content and categorization of technological protection measures are presented as also a classification based on easiness to circumvent it.