Copyright and digital rights management

51. évfolyam, 2005. 3. szám

AMBERG Eszter

Könyvtári Figyelő (Library Review) vol. 15. (51.) 2005. no. 3. pp. 503 – 513.

The study deals with the amendments to the law LXXVI of 1999 on copyright in compliance with joining the European Union and the European harmonisation of copyright legislation. The article also gives an overview of the management of digital rights and some relevant technical solutions.

The latest (third) amendment to Hungarian copyright law was made in 2003 in order to comply with the provisions of the INFOSOC directive ratified by the European Parliament. The law stipulates that authors have an exclusive right to grant permission not only to use their work in digital format, but also to copy the work. The regulation is permissive towards in-house copying for institutional use, but the range of such institutions is again limited.

Digital content published on the Interned is protected by the Digital Right Management technologies allowing for the author to determine who can use the work and for what purpose.

In January 2005, a debate started about copyright issues in the digital age on the listserv of Hungarian librarians. In connection with the discussions, the Creative Commons licenses were brought up. Creative Commons is not a DRM solution, but a set of sample licences that can be used by authors in order to determine the rights to access their work by various groups of users. The national standardisation of Creative Commons has already started.

In Hungary, the Interministerial Committee on Information Society is in charge of digital copyright issues. Despite the efforts, the current digital copyright regulations are not able to protect the author from the illegal distribution of works, but they can seriously restrict the scope of services delivered by public collections.

Országos Széchényi Könyvtár
Észrevételek