Let's all sign our books

Image you buy a book, you have in your hands the book, it is yours, it is tangible.

Now image that, as in years gone by, you write in the front pages of the book "This book belongs to..." and you sign your name.

The book is now indelibly yours. If you lend it to someone it remains yours, but you no longer have it to read. If you give it away or resell it then you need to cross out your name from the fly-leaf and the new person who now owns the book can sign their name in place of your.

So the writer has written and sold one book and been paid. And their is only one book.

But for electronic or digital media (books, music, movies) the issue is very different. This because it is infinitely easy to make a digital copy on any old PC. It is infinitely easy to put the copy up on an internet site and let a million people download a copy for themselves. Which is clearly illegal as the creator has not been paid.

For this reason two arguments have arisen

1 That it should be made difficult to copy digital works. This has been implemented by a variety of encryption or DRM (Digital Rights Management) by publishers.

2 People that do download copyright works from the web should be warned and possibly cut off from the Internet. And that access to web sites that persist in hosting copyright media should be blocked.

Both of these two approaches have serious problems with consumer rights.

In the case of DRM you can only play the media on a machine that has been authorised. You cannot transcode a DVD movie across to your iPod as you are not authorised to break the DRM.

In the case of cutting people off the internet or blocking web sites, you are removing the right to free access to information, which is a fundamental right - no one stops you reading a newspaper no matter what it says.

So what to do?

One proposal I have would be to sign digital media at the point of sale with your personal signature, by watermarking or encryption. The encryption would be done with your public key of a key pair, with only you holding the private corresponding key to access the work.

If you wish to give away, lend or resell then you would release the media to the next person, who would at the same time encode it with his public key.

The result being that only one copy still exists, and the artist has been paid.