Piracy Prevention

It is asserted by Templeton (1997) that legal protection is not necessary where technological protection is available. Thus, security systems are being developed to prevent piracy of digital intellectual property. The use of new technologies can potentially eliminate the concerns of copyright infringement that new technologies are causing.

The enormity of the WWW makes it exceedingly difficult for creators to check if their works have been copied and their rights infringed. Thus, infringement often goes unnoticed by creators. Norderhaug and Oberding (1995) suggest using the web to protect intellectual property on the web, and they offer the example of using web robots that can automatically match patterns on web sites to search for republications on the WWW. This technology could potentially work to prevent WWW piracy. They also support the use of revenue models such as pay per view schemes.

Cryptography is a technique identified for maintaining the economic and moral rights of creators. In cryptography, privacy and security are preserved through the transformation of ordinary text or plaintext into coded or ciphertext through the process of encryption. This means that privacy and security are preserved (Shade, 1995).

These are just two of many technological security systems that can be used to enforce copyright on the WWW. It is paramount that such measures be taken in the interest of protecting rights of creators.