Geospatial Digital Rights Management

March 1, 2006 By: Tina Cary

What is geospatial digital rights management? How does it benefit users of digital spatial content, and how does it differ from digital rights management in other industries?

Before defining geospatial digital rights management (geoDRM) and discussing its benefits, its challenges, and the key technical and policy issues surrounding it, we should begin with an introduction to digital rights management (DRM) in other fields.

The entertainment industry has brought DRM to the attention of the public with lawsuits that challenge rights with regard to peer-to-peer file-sharing technologies. That industry has a primary interest in preventing uncompensated distribution.A secondary interest involves ensuring that movies, music, and electronic books remain in their original form, unaltered.

Generally speaking, DRM involves the use of digital technology to manage access to digital media in such a way as to protect the rights of both copyright holders and purchasers. In the medical field, DRM is useful for ensuring the authenticity of medical records and for limiting access to those records to maintain an individual's privacy.

What benefits can geoDRM offer users of digital content? What progress has been made in geoDRM lately? These questions were addressed in a report issued by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC, www.opengeospatial.org), the GeoData Alliance (www.geoall.net), and the Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC, www.fgdc.gov) in February 2006. Readers can access the report on any of these organizations' Web sites.

GeoDRM versus DRM

Like many industries and communities that manage the rights of their digital content, the geospatial community benefits from DRM because it can ensure content authenticity. But the geospatial community also differs from other industries. Specifically, geospatial practitioners often assemble data from a variety of sources for the express purpose of manipulating (merging, classifying, altering) data to create new information (for example, the map mashups that captured our attention in 2005). The geospatial community also differs from other fields because both government agencies and commercial businesses serve the market. And U.S. government agencies are more interested in enabling the widespread distribution of content than in receiving monetary compensation.

Benefits. GeoDRM offers a number of benefits. First, it provides a way to protect investments in data capture by facilitating payment for use and by complementing existing legal measures. Second, geoDRM offers a way to digitally implement licensing agreements with third parties. Without such a capability, some organizations may not obtain licenses because the risk of violating license terms is perceived as greater than the benefits of obtaining the licensed content. Finally, geoDRM provides a clear audit trail for how information is derived. This provides a safeguard against unauthorized content modification, which benefits both the content supplier and the user.

Another benefit of geoDRM is that it facilitates the development of an information trading economy in the geospatial community. GeoDRM serves as a mechanism for providing both recognition and compensation, incentives that reward those who collect and publish useful content and motivate them to generate even more content in return. The combination of more content and the authentication of that content facilitates the movement of both money and information throughout the industry.

Perhaps one of the biggest benefits of geoDRM is that it encourages the development of new business models for pricing and licensing. A license could grant access to data within 500 feet of a road centerline, or to data pertaining to one specific parcel. This flexibility would allow governments to balance the need for openness with the need to protect individual privacy. For businesses, it represents a new revenue opportunity.

Figure 1. The process of managing rights involves numerous roles and relationships, as suggested by hats and arrows, respectively. In this high-level overview, "payment" is generic and includes compensation (monetary or non-monetary) by taxpayers, advertisers, users, and other entities. Courtesy of Graham Vowles, Ordnance Survey