A few months ago, Leonardo Chiariglione initiated the Digital Media Project which will become operational on 1/1/2004. As part of the project, it is planned to work on two areas which are of particular interest to copyright-minded folks:
- Mapping rights traditionally enjoyed by users to the Digital Media space. This is a very important topic. Without such a map, we cannot even start to talk about whether it is possible and desirable to code copyright limitations into technology at least to some extent. There has been some work on this topic before (e.g. at the Fair Use By Design Workshop at CFP 2002 or, to some extent, in a recent paper by Deirdre Mulligan et al.), but I haven't seen a full-fetched map of user "rights".
- Phasing out analogue levies applied to Digital Media. This topic is particularly important in many European countries where elaborate levy systems exist. Whether and how to move from a levy-based to a DRM-based environment raises lots of legal, economic and political questions. For some information on this topic, see the study by Bernt Hugenholtz et al. from Amsterdam, which is a must-read, at least if you are interested in the European situation. I have also written a little bit on this topic in a recent paper (pp. 614-617).
It seems that the Digital Media Project has chosen the right questions. Let's hope that they will be more successful in finding the right answers than SDMI a few years ago.