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	Introduction - Perceive the world like never before
	A toolbox for enhancing security in wire- less sensor networks
	Networked automotive scenarios
	Interview - Sensor networks will change our life

Ádám Kapovits Eurescom kapovits@eurescom.eu

The battle over digital rights is raging on. The music and the film industry are increasingly under economic pressure from copycats and file-sharing platforms. Content providers will have to change their business models quickly and radically, or the will find themselves out of business soon. Suing copycats is definitely not enough.

Recently, after a US circuit court has decided against it eDonkey has given up. On the other hand, LimeWire, another peer-to-peer file-sharing software developer has turned the tables and countersued the biggest record companies, accusing them of operating an illegal cartel to control the online distribution of music. LimeWire also charges the record companies with trying to extend their monopoly by forcing music distributors to work only with their affiliated filtering system supplier. LimeWire says it developed a filtering application to prevent illegal downloading and encourage legal content purchasing. But the record companies refused to give the developer access to the metadata that uniquely identify each song in order for the filtering system to work, LimeWire claims.

At the same time, Google continues to push its Google Books Library Project to digitize books and provide access to their contents through its search engine, sparking dissent from major publishers.

The Association of American Publishers has filed a lawsuit to block the Google project on the basis of copyright infringement. These recent news illustrate the confusion surrounding intellectual property and copyright. This confusion underlines the need to revisit intellectual property and copyright under the light of new technologies and their capabilities.

The reach and availability of the Internet, the evolution of some associated technologies, in particular peer-to-peer technologies, and innovative thinking are challenging established business models of the music, movie and publishing industries. In particular, the enforcement of intellectual property rights and copyrights has become more difficult. Obviously, the established businesses fight to protect their proven business models to the very end using legal and technical means. Protection through technical means open a competition spiral between encryption, watermarks and other methods to trace and control use, and methods to avoid these protection measures.

At the beginning the above industries showed very little affinity to the new technology and to the Internet, and were slow to embrace it, but lately they seem to catch up and come out with interesting propositions.

One could probably argue that because of their very nature incumbents in other sectors and industries (re-)act also slowly and adopt new business models only when absolutely necessary. This is perfectly understandable and how it should be, from their shareholders point of view, to maximise profit.

However, one interesting characteristic of the business of the above industries was lately, before the Internet came about that they tried to reduce the life-cycle of their products, their content. Their marketing machine was operating at an ever increasing speed, and the message was that only the latest is hip and tried to accelerate consumers’ consumption.

In a way this has backfired, since this strategy suggested that there are no long term cultural values, which is clearly not the case. Consumers also got tired of it, and especially became reluctant to pay not insubstantial amount of money for content that is going out of fashion at an ever increasing speed. The Internet offered an alternative to gain free, but not legal access to the very same content. The former value proposition by the content owners and “factories” contributed to the erosion of the consumer moral.

There is a particularly interesting initiative, the Digital Citizen Project at the Illinois State University that tries to answer many aspects of the new challenges surrounding digital right management. . A very important element of this initiative, besides the monitoring and enforcement, is education and making digital content easily accessible in a legal way.

Conclusions

The concept of intellectual property rights need to be re-evaluated in light of recent technical development, in particular the ubiquitous Internet and new peer-to-peer file sharing applications. Old and proven business models might need to be radically changed and the content industry might need to embrace eventually such radical new ideas as flat fee access to content, because educating the user, implementing control and policing could prove prohibitively complex and costly.

The author firmly believes that we are only at the beginning of a major transformation of the content industry.

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