Have you a right to use that …

Digital Rights Management (DRM) has been getting a mixed press of late with IT giants iTunes and Sony causing much grief to their existing and potential customers. The French Parliament is also taking a stand to as they see it as an issue concerning the rights of users.

The whole issue of DRM and the wider context of Intellectual Property Rights is very complex with numerous international treaties and EU Directives that can be extremely difficult to find your way through.

There is the growing use of two IT tools that give the everyday publisher on the internet a way of identifying themselves with their published creative efforts, namely Creative Commons licensing and the assigning and registration of electronic serial numbers – Numly.

To quote:

Numly Numbers
NUMLY ESN PORTAL REGISTRATION

Numly offers a digital rights management service by assigning unique identifiers to electronic media. All electronic publishers and digital media distributors wishing to "brand" their media with a unique digital identifiers or Electronic Serial Numbers (ESNs) should register with our portal services and generate an ESN ID with our systems for each copy of your digital asset. NUMLY.COM keeps an up-to-date and comprehensive listing of all digital media IDs registered in our databases.

Creative Commons licenses provide a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors, artists, and educators. We have built upon the "all rights reserved" concept of traditional copyright to offer a voluntary "some rights reserved" approach."

Check out the Footer of this website to see examples of each in use. Both are extremely easy to set up and use in many different media forms.

POLICOMM will develop a Fact sheet on Digital Rights Management and Intellectual Property Rights.

UPDATE

(courtesy of PoliticsonLine)

France Takes a Bite Out of Apple

French lawmakers approved copyright legislation that requires online music sellers to make songs available for use on any digital player. The measure passed in the National Assembly and will now move to the Senate for debate and a vote. The vote is expected in May.

The law would force Apple Computer to make the songs it sells at its iTunes music store playable on devices that compete with its iPod. Apple has responded negatively to the legislation calling it, “state-sponsored piracy."

Meanwhile, the debate over the law has spilled out beyond France’s borders. France is pushing the European Union to adopt similar legislation, while across the Atlantic, representatives in the United States have condemned the French legislation.

Update 2

Numly.com

Numly Now Offers Creative Commons Copyrights
Numly, formerly ESBN.ORG, has extended its All Rights Reserved copyright registration services to now include Creative Commons' Some Rights Reserved licenses!

This service is currently only available via the Numly web portal. It allows authors and artists to select their desired copyright license type to be assigned to their works in real-time. The author or artist's digital asset is registered in Numly's systems along with the date and time stamp of their submission. Numly returns a unique identifier called a Numly Number along with the HTML code required to post the Numly Number, Numly verification link, and Creative Commons license and logo in your content. The entire process takes less than 1 minute to complete!