Just a small news clip today...
There was a piece on tracking the origins of digital content in Information Week recently. Tim-Berners-Lee won one of several grants, and his work will focus on developing a mechanism to determine the origins of a piece of content. I saw some other presentations not long ago focused on how to remove the anonymity from the web. Being able to authenticate who is contributing or generating content (or who is using it) is important from a remuneration perspective. I seem to recall some other projects working on this problem too -- ACAP maybe, with their interest in being able to track who is using the content produced by publishers, such as photos from People Magazine? Maybe this is more of the direction of future DRM -- remove anonymity and it becomes easier to track, but at what cost to society? Some of the comments to the article (particularly the first couple) are worth thinking about.
