Suitable protection means against piracy has been a subject of interest within the cartographic community for years. The traditional threat can be described as someone else republishing a map as his own, without paying royalties. Proving authorship is the problem, and this has been achieved by inserting tiny errors only known to the author. The threat is different when considering digital maps, because any of the legitimate owners can be the source (or republisher) of an illegal copy, which in addition is an exact equivalent to the original. This raises a new problem: despite there exist contracts between providers and customers limiting the right to disseminate, they cannot be enforced in practice because tracking the illegal copy back to its source has not been possible in the past. Digital Rights Management Systems (DRMS) are being deployed to address some of the new issues.

Published at:GIM International, 17, 2, 51-53, 2003 2000.
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