'Killer' service clamps down on illegal access

A system that provides defence-industry strength encryption to e-learning institutions has been launched.

Last week, London-based WebGenerics released dotEncrypt, a service solution for digital-rights management. The web-based service gives researchers and academics complete control over who has access to their information.

Nick Harper, e-business strategist at WebGenerics, said the package would replace high upfront costs and unrealistic licensing pricing with an affordable, easy-to-use and revenue-generating solution.

"This is the killer application for e-learning," he said.

Hosted on Windows 2000 servers, dotEncrypt is a three-tier solution with independent database, business and user layers. The database layer stores catalogues of encrypted content and licence records. The business layer provides an application programming interface for managing content and licences. The user layer presents the content management and reporting applications to the publisher with the licence fulfilment application to the customer.

Netscape and Internet Explorer browsers are made service-savvy by a dotEncrypt plug-in that downloads automatically when the service is selected.

Researchers around the world have little idea about who is accessing their material or the monetary value lost because of illegal copyright infringement. But if, for example, a dotEncrypt user sends a friend a document sourced from the service, that user must have the plug-in to view the content and also have permission from the publisher. There are more than 3,000 business rules in the service package that companies can use to set stringent, but finely grained, access permissions, including user sets, printing and time-limited viewing The service has been licensed to Poptel, an internet service provider specialising in the voluntary and public sectors. Poptel customer Policybrief is a cooperative web project that provides a one-stop shop for all public policy initiatives in the United Kingdom. It works with UK think-tanks and independent policy institutes to provide a wide range of information about all public policy areas.

It is also provides information to the government's intranet.

Details: www.policybrief.org.uk

www.webgenerics.com

www.dotEncrypt.com