Tim Benson wrote:
>
> Digital rights management (including
> PKI access control and authentication) uses XrML (Extensible Rights Markup
> Language) to specify the user rights. XrML is the successor to Xerox
> PARC's Digital Rights Markup Language and is now supported by ContentGuard
> (jointly owned by Xerox and Microsoft).
>
Please see the Verisign site for a new technology announcent regarding
security and digital signatures in XML, also supported by Microsoft,
among others.
http://www.verisign.com/developer/xml/index.html
>
> Access to a patient record is fundamentally little different to accessing
> an eBook.
>
I am not so sure about that.
Digital rights are more concerned with whether someone has paid money
for access, not so concerned with who the payor is as long as her money
is good.
Medical records (among other kinds of personal records) have
traditionally been concerned with establishing access via a
credentialing/authorization process - not needed for public media
access. As those records attempt to become digital a whole hornet's
nest of problems arise that simply have no counterpoint when purchasing
the rights to publically available media:
- Establishing the link between a real person and their computer
identitie(s) that remains verifiable over extremely long time periods.
- Establishing authorship to individuals and ensuring that modified
copies can be detected as such, also over very long periods of time.
(the very basis of digital watermarking being proposed with digital
media is that normal people can't tell the difference, only closed
source computer software can! - see the DVD encryption fiasco that
relied on secrets being embedded in license controlled firmware!)
While digital signature technologies are often proposed to address
these issues, in practice, no one knows whether they work as scaled out
to millions of records nor whether the technology is durable enough to
last a person's lifetime. I suspect the media folks don't care about
durability as long they get paid well during the lifetime of the
distribution.
I am also suspicious that this ebook technology will last. Previous
attempts to lock media into pay per view, such as was attempted by DVD
(anyone remember that Circuit City branded format?) simply failed.
People who buy this stuff want assurances similar to those they have
when they buy a paper bound book or plastic disc, that as long as they
take physical care of the media, they will be able to use it whenever
and wherever they want.
