ublishing industry, its goals are to provide a
framework for managing intellectual content, link customers with publishers,
facilitate electronic commerce, and enable automated copyright management.

The Introduction to the Digital Object Identifier specifies:

"The Internet represents a totally new environment for commerce. As such, it
requires new enabling technologies to protect both customer and publisher.
Systems will have to be developed to authenticate content to insure that what
the customer is requesting is what is being delivered. At the same time, the
creator of the information must be sure that the copyright in the content is
respected and protected.

In considering the new systems required, international book and journal
publishers realized that a first step would be the development of a new
identification system to be used for all digital content. This Digital Object
Identifier (DOI) system not only provides a unique identification for that
content, but also a way to link users of the materials to the rights holders
themselves to facilitate automated digital commerce in the new digital
environment.

Developed and tested over the last year, the DOI system is now being used by
more than a dozen U.S. and European publishers in a pilot program that has been
running since July. Participation in Phase Two of the Prototype was extended to
all publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 1997."

Penny Pagano, a former Washington correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, is a
Washington, D.C.-based freelance writer. In Intellectual Property Rights and the
World Wide Web, an article published in AJR/NewsLink, she wrote: "Today, those
who create information and those who publish, distribute and repackage it are
finding themselves at odds with each other over the control of electronic
rights."

Among many comments mentioned by Penny Pagano is the one of Dan Carlinksy,
writer and vice president of the American Society of Journalists and Authors, in
New York.

"'The electronic explosion has changed the entire nature of the business,'
Carlinsky says. In the past, articles sold to a periodical essentially 'turned
into a pumpkin with no value' once they were published. 'But the electronic
revolution has extended the shelf life of content of periodicals. You can now
take individual articles and put them into a virtual bookstore or put them on a
virtual newsstand.'

The second major change in recent years, he says,