Is your information management as good as Amazon?
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Amazon’s withdrawal of ebooks by George Orwell seems positively Orwellian; ‘owners’ of the ebooks on Kindle woke up last week to discover that they should have read the small print. All they had was a licence for the ebooks and when it turned out that the publisher didn’t have the rights to sell that licence to Amazon to sell on to customers , Amazon revoked the licences and issued automatic refunds. A seamless if disturbing experience that proves that one cheap ebook reader from Elonex does not a mass market make. But if you needed to update a company price list or redact internal guidelines, could you do it with anything approaching the same efficiency?
A rich permissions-based licence system (as opposed to a simple encrypted, here’s one key and don’t lose it DRM system) gives content owners a lot of control. A writer could give away a free chapter with a discount code, give away a 3-month ready copy that you had to pay to keep or have their backlist turn free for a month every year or whatever incentive model they wanted to try out – and they could change it if it didn’t work. Can you even block last month’s price list from being sent out by accident?
The Windows Rights Management service in Windows Server is a start, coupled with Office and SharePoint (one of the reasons Google Docs isn’t as scary to Microsoft as the free Office 2010 Web apps might make you think). Keep pricelists in a SharePoint library set to expire after 30 days and people will have to go to a lot more trouble (extracting and resaving the information) to use out of date prices than to get current ones. Sure people can photograph the screen or read the document out to an accomplice over the phone. At that point you’re dealing with malicious behaviour rather than the simple desire to do your job that is responsible for the majority of information leaks and technology isn’t the right solution. But if you’re doing modern security and reperimeterisation (the perimeter isn’t gone, it’s just around the data itself), you need to think about information in terms of rights and licences, not bits and bytes and firewalls.
-Mary
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