Digital Object Identifier: implementing a standard digital identifier as the key to effective digital rights management.
Norman Paskin · 2000
The future of the content industry is now clearly tied to the future of the Internet and its successors, requiring a fundamental shift from physical to electronic dissemination. All current varieties of intellectual property (e.g. books, music, journals, video, software), and those types yet to be invented, will be involved in this migration, and the boundaries that exist between current content types, especially at the level of supporting infrastructure, will be eliminated. Instead of (or in addition to) different physical formats requiring different content distribution infrastructures, all content will consist of streams of digital data moving over networks. Diverse content industries will increasingly find themselves sharing the same problems and opportunities in delivering their content to their consumers. One of the key issues in the move from physical to electronic distribution of content is the evolution of a common technical and procedural infrastructure to identify, or name, pieces of content in a digital environment. A common and well understood approach to referencing objects is essential to the evolution of services required for content providers to grow and prosper in the era of increasingly sophisticated computer networking. The referencing system must also work with existing systems for naming tangible and intangible intellectual property entities. In 1998 the International DOI Foundation (IDF) was established to address this challenge, assuming a leadership role in the development of a multi-tiered framework of infrastructure, policies and procedures to support multinational, multi-community content provider requirements. Membership in the IDF is open to all organisations (for-profit or not-for-profit) with an interest in electronic publishing and its related enabling technologies. Major components of the IDF mission involve stimulating interest in and understanding of this framework, encouraging alliances and collaborative activities designed to explore in depth the complex issues to be addressed, and influencing the development of standards which would ensure the appropriate level of value-added and quality control across the spectrum of participation. The main activity of the IDF is to encourage the implementation and use of a standard digital identifier: the Digital Object Identifier (DOI). The IDF was an early supporter of the INDECS (Interoperability of Data in E-Commerce) initiative, providing financial support and promoting the concept of well-formed interoperable metadata. It has used indecs as its metadata model.