Digital Rights Management (DRM) in the Libraries of Digital-era: Concepts, IPR Issues & Concerns of LIS Community

A rapid shifting perceived from traditional content to digital media due to increasing advantages in every step of the information life cycle: create, collect, organize, store, access, deliver & use. Along with the advantages, digital content transactions are more likely prone to effects through IPR issues. Copyright and intellectual property rights (IPR) have been established and extended over hundreds of years, but implementing the same in the digital environment faces huge challenges. This article started by introducing digital rights & digital rights management (DRM), its architectural framework & techniques, and associated IPR issues. The perception of the LIS community about the role & responsibility of users & library professionals to solve these problems are the main focus of the latter part. A short survey is conducted using Google form questionnaire (N=238) and targeted all four categories, namely, LIS students (100 or 40%), LIS research scholars (25 or 10%), LIS faculties (18 or 85) & Library professionals (95 or 32%); to get the perception of the LIS community. The targeted experimental documents are categories of digital contents by their origin (i.e. Born, Turn & Gain digital documents). The geographical scope of the study extends beyond India to include some international viewpoints as well. In responses, no of the female respondent (131 or 55%) is slightly higher than male respondents (107 or 45%), while the majority of responses came from the Punjab state (42 or 19.72%). The survey findings suggested that Online materials (113 or 50.90%) Turn digital documents (168 or 75.68%) are more likely prone to IPR issues. Among users’ responsibilities, “Use of proper acknowledgement, referencing & citation” is the most preferred one (221 or 99.55%) and “Arrange orientation & outreach programme regarding IPR issues” is indicated as the major responsibility (212 or 95.50%) of the library professionals.