Access denied

As an IT leader, you are responsible for company content that is probably used and stored in countless ways.

Every day, you make potentially damaging decisions regarding the data assets in your business. So it is vital that you make the right decisions.

As this month’s Computing Business cover story shows, picking your way through the digital rights minefield can be an intractable challenge. The same information is often duplicated many times over, held in several databases and accessed through various systems. To sort data rights management, the chief information officer needs to be attentive to policy-making – the ‘who, when, why and what’ of content access.

Working out who is allowed to open key documents will help you establish company standards. And technologies such as tracking and authentication can help to ensure your policies are enforced.

But while standards and technologies can help reduce potential damage to information assets, it is important to recognise that the digital rights minefield can expose many unwelcome surprises.

Ownership of content, for example, is a delicate issue. And in the information age the concept of possession is a lot murkier.

Take, say, the ownership of music. Remember the feeling of guilt people used to get as they illegally copied albums to cassette tapes in the eighties and nineties?

Such feelings of shame are now a long and distant memory, with citizens across the land burning home-made compilations on digital kit, the quality of which would have been unthinkable just a decade ago.

And record sales have dropped by 20 per cent in the past five years.

Warn your kids and work colleagues, however: big business is biting back. This month’s cover story highlights a series of landmark cases that are helping to turn the tide in favour of the record companies.

Additional change is expected in the wake of the government’s Gowers review, which recommends increasing online piracy and fileshare penalties to 10 years.

The report recommends that consumers be allowed limited private use, such as when they are switching CD content from one format to another – such as PC to MP3.

Cassettes, on the other hand, have been consigned to history. When trying to buy one in a high-street retailer recently, I was told there was no demand for them – which was odd because the same retailer sold cassette recorders.

The complexities of digital rights management suggest you should not expect your creation and use of content to be more straightforward.