The Copyright Protection Problem: Challenges and Suggestions

The advances in networking and multimedia technologies have created opportunities for producers of digital content. However, the ability for anyone to make perfect copies of digital content and the ease by which copies can be distributed facilitate misuse, illegal distribution, plagiarism, misappropriation. Moreover, popular peer-to-peer software are widely used by Internet "pirates" to illegally share digital copyrighted content, thus violating the legal rights of the copyright owners. Known solutions like Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems aim at protecting and enforcing the legal rights associated with the use of digital content distributed on the Internet, but they may also disturb the balance between the information creation and distribution, and give rise to problems concerning with privacy. In fact, "fair use" and privacy are often invoked by web users: the former in order to prevent copyright owners from having the exclusive control over their creations than the copyright law intends, and the latter in order to preserve the ownership and distribution of confidential data. This paper reports on the most important problems tied to the use of DRM systems and, in the light of the current forensic trends, provides a number of suggestions that can be helpful to meet the conflicting interests of web users and content providers.