Poster on Electronic Circulation of Copyrighted Information in CSCW Environments

Computing and communications technologies have revolutionized the methods for creation, reproduction, and dissemination of copyrighted multimedia information. The demand on this electronic information increases rapidly as developers and users migrate to computer supported cooperative work, or CSCW, environments. Central to CSCW environments is information sharing both atthe intra- as well as the inter-group levels. The electronic circulation of copyrighted information among group members poses numerous problems. Firstly, the time frame of transactions executed to obtain conventional copyrights is largely incompatible with information circulation time frames in group activities. In principle, a group activity is halted until respective members obtain legal rights on all copyrighted objects that they will access during this activity: an unacceptable delay, especially if members are cooperating in real-time. Secondly, group members often engage in ad-hoc and short-lived activities in which they utilize composites of copyrighted objects; object composition, decomposition, and encapsulation activities will incur unnecessary delays under conventional copyright mechanisms. Thirdly, conventional cost models for copyrighted objects largely fail to supportthe economicsof group activities, specifically, minimizing the cost per member and per application of a copyrighted object. Finally, conventional copyright mechanisms neither allow nor account for autonomous sharing of an object under different rights for different members in the same group or across groups. Accordingly, we can identify a set of requirements for the electronic circulation of copyrighted objects in CSCW environments: (1) a circulation mechanism must provide online real-time transactions for securing rights to copyrighted objects, and incorporate such transactions into the sharing activity itself; (2) autonomous intra- and inter-group sharing at varying levels of rights on the object must be supported and accounted for in the cost model: (3) the cost model must be adaptive to the dynamics of group characteristics