5.3 Legislation relating to the use of ICT for storage, manipulation and access of information

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Data Protection Act
3. Copyright legislation
   1. Ownership and duration of copyright
   2. Copyright and the Internet
   3. Digital Rights Management (DRM)
   4. Digital watermarking
4. Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)

Digital Rights Management (DRM)

This is a large area but the greatest and most visible use is (and will be even more so in the future) the prevention of copying of films (movies) from DVDs. This requires mechanisms to be active in one or both of the DVD disk itself and the DVD player or computer used. Examples are:

• the need to keep a Satellite Television receiver box connected to the public telephone network
• certain high definition film disks can only be played back on a computer which is connected to the Internet
• the very latest large screen television displays will need a special module to display the coming high definition DVD films. Absence of the module disables the output from the DVD player. The existence of the module guarantees that the incoming digital signal is not being copied.
• the regional coding of DVDs which does not allow a DVD disk purchased in the USA to be played on a European region DVD player.

You can find additional information at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_rights_management

Let's look now at Digital watermarking ...