One of the thorny issues still to be worked out to everyone’s satisfaction as far as the web is concerned is copyright protection, which some fear will hamper the legal distribution of copyrighted works (like this newsletter!) over the wire. Next week will see the official launch of Digital Property Rights Language (DPRL) from Xerox Corp, at the DocuWorld ’96 conference in San Francisco, which is being claimed will allow publishers to assign an electronic copyright symbol to content such as digitally rendered books, movies, software or other forms of data. The thing effectively stamps a ‘watermark’ a file to see if it is printed or only let it be printed by a trusted printer, though these seem quite weak ways of preventing miscreants running off 100,000 free copies of your article, novel or film. The work is the first thing of substance that seems to have come out of Xerox’s fabled Palo Alto Research Center since the 1970s. IBM has already announced it has licensed DPRL for the Cryptolope containers for its InfoMarket (claimed to be a secure environment for e-commerce) initiative.
