First principles of copyright for DRM design

Abstract

The copyright system's legal, technological, and economic foundations define key concepts that have significant implications for digital rights management (DRM) system design. Extracting the technological, legal, and economic functions of copyright helps us identify principles that should be the basis for the design of DRM systems. However, no system currently supports that set of functions. Neither those who seek to manage authors' rights nor the defenders of access rights are entirely aligned with copy accuracy in that no system motivates and rewards authoring, filtering, and distribution. The most interesting question is how to design a system that completely fulfills the functions as copy accuracy - it would require more than secure storage.