OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) TC

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  • 1.  DRM issues

    Posted 11-07-2005 18:31
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    Subject: DRM issues


    Greetings!
    
    I think Gary's point about ODF being an open document format is well 
    taken but do think some nod in the direction of DRM issues might be in 
    order.
    
    Afterall, if I want to write an implementation that otherwise uses ODF 
    and wish to layer a DRM solution on top of it, surely that is a 
    legitimate use of the work product of this committee.
    
    Granted, it is possible to encrypt parts of an ODF document along the 
    lines that is used by Adobe, but that does not address issues such as 
    copy, print, modify, etc.
    
    The senario where government agencies will want to regulate access to 
    certain parts of a document is a very real one in secure environments, 
    which appear to be on the rise within the US government. I don't know of 
    any reason why they could not use ODF, provided they layered an 
    appropriate DRM/security system on top of the format.
    
    Suggestion: What if the various DRM technologies were reviewed and a 
    report issued saying that ODF is compatible with DRM technologies that 
    impose restrictions on addressable portions of a document, plus some 
    statement about DRM being application specific?
    
    I would hesitate to go beyond such a report as the entire DRM question, 
    particularly if it includes secure environments would take us far afield 
    from what I think most of us would consider to be ODF questions. 
    Security/DRM questions are very important but also involve 
    network/application architectures, encryption, security protocols, and a 
    host of other issues that are really beyond questions of an open 
    document format.
    
    For example, in our telephone conference today the question of 
    concealing an illustration was raised. Yes, most of us think about only 
    concealing the illustration but there are use cases for concealing the 
    fact that an illustration ever appeared in the document. Which would 
    require suppressing appearance of the illustration in an illustration 
    list, the illustration itself (and the fact it occurred at all), plus 
    any references to the illustration. That is certainly doable, but not 
    something I think we want to spend time specifying in an open document 
    format TC.
    
    Hope everyone is having a great day!
    
    Patrick
    
    PS: I would be willing to volunteer to work with others who are 
    interested in creating a ODF/DRM report for the TC to approve and issue.
    
    -- 
    Patrick Durusau
    Patrick@Durusau.net
    Chair, V1 - Text Processing: Office and Publishing Systems Interface
    Co-Editor, ISO 13250, Topic Maps -- Reference Model
    Member, Text Encoding Initiative Board of Directors, 2003-2005
    
    Topic Maps: Human, not artificial, intelligence at work! 
    
    
    


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