HyperNews: a commercial electronic newspaper

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Book Chapter

Reference

HyperNews: a commercial electronic newspaper

MORIN, Jean-Henry, KONSTANTAS, Dimitri

Abstract

MEDIA is a platform that allows the commercialization and dissemination of electronic documents under similar conditions as printed documents using an agent-based, distributed and secure platform. Documents in the MEDIA system are encapsulated within agents which the reader must execute in order to access their contents. The developed pilot application of MEDIA is HyperNews, a commercial electronic newspaper environment allowing its readers to buy articles from different information providers (electronic newspaper publishers) and compose their own personalized newspaper.

MORIN, Jean-Henry, KONSTANTAS, Dimitri. HyperNews: a commercial electronic newspaper.

In: Tsichritzis, Dionysios. Electronic commerce objects = Objets de commerce électronique . Genève : Centre universitaire d'informatique, 1998. p. 147-163

Available at:

http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:155931

Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version.

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HyperNews: a commercial electronic newspaper

Jean-Henry Morin Dimitri Konstantas

Abstract

MEDIA ¹is a platform that allows the co=ercialization and dissemination of electronic documents under similar conditions as printed documents using an agent-based, distributed and secure platform. Documents in the MEDIA system are encapsulated within agents which the reader must execute in order to access their contents. The developed pilot application of MEDIA is HyperNews, a co=ercial electronic newspaper environment allowing its readers to buy articles from different information providers (electronic newspaper publishers) and compose their own personalized newspaper.

1 Introduction

Today's dominant medium of information distribution and dissemination are printed documents such as letters, books, newspapers, articles and magazines. However, over the last few years the volume of documents exchanged for private communications, or available for public access in electronic form [27][28][29][30][16] has increased exponentially. The reason for this is dual.

First, the majority of these documents, ranging from private letters to complete books, are directly created in electronic form using a computer editing system, and second, the wide availability of computer networks has allowed the faster and cheaper exchange of the electronic versions of the documents. Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of documents exchanged over computer networks are of non-commercial and non-confidential nature. Apart from CD-ROM titles that are treated by the publishers as normal books, commercial document distributors, like book editors, newspaper publishers, and legal organizations are reluctant to distribute their documents in electronic form via the network.

Their prudence is well motivated by a number of reasons which become clear if we com- pare the traditional commercialization of printed documents with the commercialization of their electronic counter-part. There are three stages in the commercialization of documents: production, distribution and dissemination. Although production of electronic documents offers signif- icant advantages over the traditional hard copy printing this hardly seems to be the case for the distribution and dissemination stages. The distribution of electronic document is now catching up with traditional mail and courier services, as far as reliability and security are concerned, while the dissemination of electronic documents still exhibits tremendous disadvantages in the control ofownership rights [25][6][7].

I. Tiris project is supported by the Swiss Federal Government with the FNRS SPP-ICS projects MEDIA (5003-045332) and HyperNews (5003-045333)

147

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The major advantage of the electronic version of documents in the production stage is that they do not require printing machines. In addition, ifthe electronic document is to be distributed over the network, all reproduction is done by software at practically no cost and without any electronic reproduction equipment, like diskette or tape drives.

The distribution of hard-copy documents has been long ago instituted and several legal and practical warranties exist concerning the distribution, reliability, confidentiality and integrity of the documents. It is only recently with the development of reliable networks, secure encryption [24] and data exchange algorithms [8] that public networks can provide the same warranties for the transfer of data. This way electronic documents can be safely and securely distributed over a public network without any major concerns regarding unauthorized access or tampering of the electronic document by the average network user. Clearly, however, someone with enough processing power can break the network's security; nevertheless this is comparable with traditional hard copy distribution where someone with enough money and/or authority can bypass the legal and practical security warranties.

The real commercialization problems begin when the electronic document has reached its destination. With printed documents there are practical limitations to copying, modifying or re- distributing a document. For example it is very expensive, if not impossible, to modify the contents of a printed document without leaving traces, whereas copying, for example, a book is in general more expensive than buying a new copy. In addition even if the printed document is passed from one person to another there is still one single copy of it. Electronic documents on the other hand can be easily modified, copied, and distributed to many individuals without the original owner losing his own copy and without need to inform or even get authorization from the publisher of the document. Although techniques exist allowing one to control the integrity of a document and authenticate its publisher in an unambiguous way, the major problem relies in the ability to create and distribute unauthorized copies of the document at virtually no cost.

This is eventually the major reason for which commercial intellectual work, like books, rarely appear in electronic form.

The aim of the MEDIA (Mobile Electronic Documents with Interacting Agents) project is to develop the means that will allow the protection, commercialization and dissemination of electronic documents under similar conditions as printed documents and, in addition, offer the electronic document reader all the advantages of electronic information processing technology [20]. In this paper we give an overview of the MEDIA platform and present HyperNews, the MEDIA pilot application. In section 2 we present the MEDIA approach for electronic document distribution, while in section 3 we give a brief overview of the MEDIA project. Section 4 de- scribes the HyperNews system, presenting the design requirements and overall architecture.

Section 5 outlines a usage scenario of the HyperNews system and section 6 presents our conclu- sion and future directions.

2 The MEDIA Approach for Electronic Document Distribution

Traditionally electronic documents are seen as a collection of data that include the document contents (text, images etc.) and possible simple or complex formatting instructions. The reader

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J-H Morin and D. Konstantas 149 of the electronic document has all the software needed to display the data. The MEDIA project however takes a different direction and considers electronic documents as programs that need to be intetpreted in order to reveal their contents. The reader does not have a simple data displaying software but an intetpreter for the language in which the electronic document is encoded. This way the electronic document is a program that the reader must execute in order to read it. The document producer can thus include instructions not only defining the structure of the information and how it should be displayed, but also interacting with the reader. For example, asking authorization passwords, verifying the integrity of its contents, decrypting sensitive parts of the document, allowing the reader to interrogate it and obtain basic information about its contents, and even sending messages through the network to the document publisher. These type of programs are referred in the literature as agents [31].

The most important issue in the distribution of electronic documents is how to enforce copyright and ensure the payment of ownership rights. Traditional approaches [ 17][ 5] enforce the copyright control and payment at the point of the distribution of the electronic document de- livering the raw document data. The customer receives either a password, which enables him to login to the provider's server and retrieve the desired documents, or/and a decrypting key allowing him to decrypt the document. Our approach in the MEDIA project differs from other approaches at the point where the copyright control and payment of ownership rights are enforced.

The MEDIA approach transfers the point of payment from the provider to the reader site, deliv- ering an agent instead of raw data, so that the copyright control and payment is enforced when reading the document and not when downloading it. An agent contains an encrypted version of the document as well as instructions on how and when to decrypt it. When the agent is intetpreted by the MEDIA system intetpreter it initiates the payment of the corresponding fees and when the payment transaction has been completed it decrypts the document and presents it to the reader (more details on the protocol used and the handling of the encryption keys and payment can be found in [22]). To be noted that the MEDIA system does not store the decrypted document locally in the readers system but keeps it in memory. This way the unauthorized extraction of the plaintext document by the reader is a non-trivial task. On the other hand the agent-encapsulated article can be freely copied and distributed without compromising the author's rights.

Other similar approaches, like the IBM's Cryptolope [12][13] and InterTrust's DigiBox [3 ], also use agent encapsulation, transferring the point of payment from the provider to user site.

However unlike MEDIA where the user never gains access to the plaintext document, Cryptol- ope and DigiBox finally deliver to the reader the plaintext document.

3 Overview of the MEDIA Project

The MEDIA project [14] is composed of three sub-projects: ASAP, the Agent System Architec- ture and Platform, KiyPict, a software environment for copyrighting, authenticating, archiving and retrieving pictorial documents in multimedia databases, and HyperNews, the pilot Hyper- media Newspaper application.

The ASAP project [ 15] addresses key issues in the construction of distributed applications over vast and dynamic networks of computers using mobile software agents [11]. Mobile soft-

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ware agents embody a new paradigm for the design and implementation of distributed applications. Each agent is a self-contained, autonomous entity, able to move around a network and interact with other agents as well as local services. The goal of ASAP is to deliver an execution platform that supports development of applications based on mobile software agents. This technology will be an infrastructure for developing commercial information systems in large scale, dynamic and heterogeneous networks of computers (21].

KryPict project's (23] main goal is to develop copyright enforcement and document au- thentication methods that will allow to digitally watermark images. As a result, information providers will be able to make accessible their images over the network without having to fear that these images will be stolen and that their copyright be infringed. In a manner similar to what paper mills have been doing for centuries, the idea is to encode a digital signature (digital watermark) within one's own digitized pictorial document; the primary function of this watermark is to unequivocally identify the owner of the picture. The difficulty is here to find a watermarking procedure which will be resistant to a wide variety of treatments. An added requirement could be that the watermark keeps track of some of the processing performed on the document.

The two most typical applications of such digital watermarking could be the establishment of the original source of a picture, and the certification that a given picture has not been tampered with or doctored.

The HyperNews project (20][19] aims in the design and development of an application for the commercial dissemination of information, demonstrating the capabilities of the MEDIA platform. The target application is an electronic newspaper in which each news article is "sold"

independently, allowing the user to choose and pay only for the articles in which he is interested in. In order to allow the commercialization of news distribution, news articles will not be simple data but rather they will be encapsulated within agents. This way every time the reader wishes to read an article he will have to engage the corresponding agent which will take the necessary actions for honoring the commercial transaction. For example, after checking the readers authorization or triggering the transfer of some electronic currency rrom the reader's account to the news publisher's account, the agent will decode the encrypted data (news article) and present it to the user.

The introduction of paid news articles in the network will enhance the service quality of- fered to the newspaper readers. Today a large number of electronic newspapers exist in the network which however offer a simple electronic version of their printed edition.With a paid electronic newspaper however the reader will be able to receive higher quality, faster and even con- tinuous information updates, personalized services and less annoying advertisement. We anticipate that paid electronic newspapers over the WWW will become the major competition to existing news-feed services, such as Reuters or Bloomberg.

4 HyperNews: Hypermedia Newspaper

The pilot application of the MEDIA project is HyperNews an electronic newspaper (20](19].

The HyperN ews (Hypermedia Electronic Newspaper) is using the MEDIA infrastructure for developing an integrated commercial electronic newspaper system. HyperNews offers the publish-

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J-H. Morin and D. Konstantas 151 ers of newspapers, magazines and alike the means to commercialize electronically the information they hold Wider similar conditions as the printed versions, supporting copyright control and handling revenue collection. In addition, HyperNews, offers the newspaper reader all the advantages of a printed copy issue, like anonymity and free choice of newspaper to read, as well as advanced information access capabilities, like breaking news updates, per article read payment, and event evolution tracing.

The Hypermedia Newspaper has three major components (Figure 1):

1. the information consumer side (Hypermedia Electronic Newspaper - HEN) 2. the information provider side (Electronic News Server - ENS)

3. the network linking the two sides

On the client side, the HEN presents a personalized virtual newspaper with the relevant information topics retrieved according to the reader's information profile in a layout specified by the reader's presentation profile. Both of these profiles represent a given context for the reader.

Each reader can have more than one context, according to his interests. For example while he is reading the newspaper at the office the context will be specified according to professional interests. However, at home the context will be defined to reflect private interests, which can be quite different from professional interests (e.g. sports, cinema etc.). On the server side, the different information providers are independent from each other. The hyperlinks represent the accurate and up-to-date information generated by the client request. The hyperlinks to the information '.11'- chives represent the historical evolution of each piece of information if any is available.

The HEN allows the reader to retrieve, read and pay only those news articles that interest him from the different ENS that are available on the network. Related articles from different ENS' s can be connected with hyper links allowing the reader to easily retrieve and read all information about a specific subject or event. In addition hyperlinks can be available to older articles of the same subject so that the evolution of the event can be easily traced. The ENS classifies the news articles according to the classification scheme of the information provider, allowing

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the HEN to retrieve the news articles, set up the hyperlinks according to the readers interests and present the personalized version of the newspaper to the reader.

4.1 Overview of the Hyper News Design Requirements

The design and implementation of the HyperNews application was based on a set of requirements ensuring its commercial orientation and character. These requirements reflect the funda- mental interests of the electronic newspaper publisher and consumer and namely the fact that the publisher is interested in providing a profitable service fulfilling the needs of the consumer, while the consumer is interested in obtaining a reliable service for the right price. Here we give an overview of the basic requirements; an extended description can be found in [18].

Anonymity

As with traditional commerce a reader does not need to reveal his identity to the publisher of a magazine or newspaper in order to buy it, so with an electronic newspaper the reader should be able to buy information without having to reveal, in any direct or indirect way [ 1 O], his identity to the publisher.

Payment, Usage and Access

In the traditional newspaper publishing industry, the smallest information unit that can be put on the market is the issue and its price is fixed accordingly. In an electronic newspaper however, the granularity of the marketable information unit can be brought down to the level of the article.

In fact what the electronic information consumer will be interested in buying are articles and not complete editions.

It is quite common for a person to read something in a newspaper and to wish to show it to somebody else. With printed material this is easily done by simply cutting the item or giving the complete edition to another person. In an electronic system however this process although feasible, has important copyright violation side effects. The reason is that instead of passing to the other person the specific item, and in consequence loosing possession of it, we actually make a copy of the item. This copying eventually violates copyright law. Thus the electronic newspaper system should allow the reader to pass freely information items to other persons without violat- ing copyright law.

Once the consumer has paid for an information item he should be able to read it at a later time without having to pay for it a second time. Although this might look like an obvious possibility it is an important requirement since in the MEDIA system payment of author rights is done at the moment of reading the document. Subsequent reading of the document by the same reader should not result in a second payment of the author rights.

Free Choice of Providers

In an electronic commerce environment the consumer should be able to choose freely from where he buys services and goods. This means that any system that is installed should not be, a- priori, bound to a specific provider.

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J-H Morin and D. Konstantas 153

Off-line Activity

It is a common practice for a person to buy a magazine or newspaper and read it at different lo- cations, like when traveling or even while taking a bath. An electronic newspaper system should allow the reader to read, and in consequence pay for, articles that are stored locally even in the absence of a network.

Notification of Update Availability

In an electronic newspaper system means are needed to offer the information consumer the possibility of being notified immediately upon availability of information updates on desired issues.

Information selection

Different newspapers have different specializations and present events in different ways. In an electronic information world we will have a large number of electronic newspapers available.

The information consumer should thus be able to define which kind of information he wishes to obtain from each electronic newspaper.

Information Presentation

Layout and presentation of the information is of major importance in a printed newspaper. The reader is accustomed to find the sections of interest at fixed places. However in an electronic newspaper where the information consumer receives only independent news articles from different information providers there can be no predefined presentation schema. The reader should be able to define in a general and abstract way how, in which order and which layout the news articles should be presented.

User Interface

Since it is not feasible nor desirable to create a new hypertext browser, the electronic newspaper system should be able to run within any Java enabled Web browsers.

Information Access and In/ ormation Evolution

The information consumer should be able to easily access older information and trace the evolution of events. This means that published articles should be immutable and identifiable.

Information Consumer Mobility

Situations in which people require high geographical flexibility and mobility are common now- adays. Consequently, they often have access to many different hosts like for example a worksta- tion at the office, a desktop at home, a laptop when traveling and a palmtop on vacation. Thus the electronic newspaper system should allow the reader to move his electronic newspaper environment between different hosts in a simple way.

The Information Consumer as an In/ ormation Provider

To illustrate this requirement we consider the following two examples where a user receives an article: (i) the user decides to forward it to a friend together with some comments. (ii) the user decides to forward it to a client together with some comments for which a fee must be paid. In

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both cases a new article is created, which contains the original article and the comments with a possible corresponding price. The idea here is that an information consumer can become an information provider of his own added value and a reseller of other information provider's material without infringing any copyright or intellectual property law. Thus information consumers should be able to publish new articles embedding articles of other providers together with their own added value comments and information. The final reader will have to pay both providers in order to read the article and the attached comments.

Marketing policies

Of major importance in the success of a service is the choice of the right marketing policy. Thus the information providers of electronic newspapers should be able to implement flexible and adaptable payment policies. For example the article price can change depending on its publica- tion date (last week news have in general no value!). This should be feasible without any need for the reader to interact with the publisher. The article itself should be able to figure out its cur- rent price.

4.2 The HyperNews Architecture

At the very early stages of the project we designed and implemented a first HyperNews proto- type that served as a proof of concept for the initial discussions with our publishing partner, the weekly magazine "L'Hebdo"[l6]. It also helped us identify the issues and the requirements for an electronic newspaper system based on agents. With the experience gained from the first pro- totype and the above presented requirements we designed and implemented in Java [9][2] an agent based HyperNews system [19] on top of the Mole [26] agent platform.

The agent based HyperNews system is composed of three layers shown graphically in Fig- ure 2 The lowest gray shaded layer is the agent layer representing the underlying agent infrastructure (Java Virtual Machine and Mole) over which the HyperNews system is implemented.

The second layer, the core environment, is the basic building block of the MEDIA system. It enables the safe and secure distribution and exchange of electronic documents. The top layer, the HyperNews application layer, implements the various tools, applications and user interface bound to the HyperNews system. This layer has two components depending on the role played by the user, either as an information consumer or as an information provider.

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The layered approach offers the advantage of a clear separation between the HyperNews application and the core environment enabling the commercial exchange of electronic documents. Such an approach leads to a framework for the electronic publishing field offering a common underlying infrastructure to different classes of electronic publishing applications including electronic newspaper systems, digital libraries and other value added electronic publishing ser-

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J-H Morin and D. Konstantas 155 vices. These can be considered as classes of applications sharing many common characteristics such as copyright protection, revenue collection and security.

4.2.1 The Core Environment

In order to handle efficiently the security requirements of the system the core environment is de- composed into three main areas holding agents, according to the privileges and roles of the agents: the entry-point area, the restricted area and the system area. Tue general idea of this de- composition is that any incoming or outgoing agent must first pass through an entry-point area before it is granted either access rights or clearance for leaving. Once a foreign agent has been granted access rights, it is relocated in the restricted area. In the restricted area an agent is not allowed to initiate any action (i.e. not allowed to execute) without having acquired prior authorization from an agent of the system area. Foreign agents can never reside into the system area.

Finally, all user interaction and local system resources are managed by agents residing in the system area. Figure 3 illustrates the complete architecture of the core environment with the agents of the HyperNews specific application. In this section we present the major agents of the core environment used by the HyperNews applications. A more detailed description of the architecture can be found in [19].

The Entry-point Area

Although security is taken into account at the agent platform level, a second level of security needs to be introduced from HyperNews to enforce application level security policies. The core system provides mechanisms to master and control agent traffic between the platform and the outside world. This is done by the entry-point area. Tue role of this area is to be a placeholder of incoming and outgoing agents before they acquire authorization for either entering or leaving the platform. In addition, this area holds a unique system agent: the access-control agent. Tue access-control agent is the equivalent of a fire-wall providing migration authorization to outgoing agents and credential and authorization control of incoming agents.

The Restricted Area

Tue restricted area, is the placeholder for all the foreign user agents when granted access rights.

Tue user agents have restricted rights and most of the actions they undertake have to be accepted or processed by system agents. For the HyperNews application we have four types of user agents: the information provider proxy agents, the HyperNews article agents, the default proxy agent and the proxy-update agent.

An information provider proxy agent acts as a local representative of the information provider on the user's host handling all the interactions between the local consumer and the corresponding remote provider.

Tue default-proxy agent is the universal information provider proxy agent. It replaces any unavailable information provider proxy agent on the information consumer's system for interacting with orphan article agents.

The HyperNews article agent is the wrapper of two elements: the article content (i.e., the raw material) and the code defining the behavior to access this content.

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The proxy-update agent is used by information providers to update (i.e. reprogram or download) their proxy agents residing on the hosts of information consumers.

The HyperNews System Area

The HyperNews system area holds the system agents and namely, the agent-manager agent, the proxy-manager agent, the electronic-commerce agent, the storage agent, the local HyperNews server agent, the HyperNews GUI application agent and the small-httpd agent. The characteris- tic of agents belonging to this area is that they are system agents and as such they have access to all system resources inside and outside of the platform. Moreover, these agents can not mi- grate. The system agents represent the core elements of the MEDIA and HyperNews system.

The agent-manager agent is responsible for the management and monitoring of all the agents of the agent execution platform.

The proxy-manager agent is responsible for the control of all the actions that a foreign agent wants to undertake.

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J-H Morin and D. Konstantas 157 The electronic-commerce agent is responsible for handling payments and other monetary transactions. This agent is the only one authorized to create an outgoing billing agent.

The storage agent is responsible for all the actions requiring access to a storage system.

The local-HyperNews-server agent is the core element of the HyperNews application con- trolling access to resources and, processing and dispatching requests.

The HyperNews GUI application agent implements all the GUI aspects ofHyperNews ex- cept for the HyperNews reader which is a standard Java enabled Web browser (ex. Netscape).

The small-httpd agent implements a local reduced web server in order to process all the Hy- perNews requests issued by the local HyperNews user.

4.2.2 The HyperNews Application Components and Tools

The HyperNews application provides to the user a number of tools allowing him to manage his environment and access the required news articles. There are two types of users of the Hyper- News system, the consumer and the provider, each requiring its own set of tools.

The Information Consumer

The basic needs of the information consumer is to be informed according to his specific interests using a personalized layout. The information consumer is thus equipped with tools allowing him to manage contexts of information (i.e., electronic newspapers), specify where information is to come from, what are his information interests (i.e., information profile), how the information is to be presented in terms oflayout (i.e., presentation profile) and to retrieve, manage and read the HyperNews articles through a hypermedia newspaper reading tool. The major tools are the context manager, the information profiler, the presentation profiler, the electronic wallet and the HyperNews reader.

The context manager tool provides the information consumer a way to manage the different information contexts according to his needs. The information profiler tool allows the user to se- lect, add, remove and modify the users personal information source address directory and specify explicitly his information interests. The presentation profiler tool allows the user to define how and where the information is to be shown. The electronic wallet implements the user interface for commercial transactions and management with the financial and credit institutions.

The HyperNews reader is the interface to the hypermedia newspaper system. It is a Java enabled WWW browser. We presently use Netscape but any other browser can be used. Figure 4 shows an example of the HyperNews reader presenting a container page ofa user's personal newspaper entitled work. The top frame contains a context selector applet. The bottom left frame contains a section selector applet. The bottom right frame contains the set of articles relevant to the business section of the work context. Each entry displays general information about its content (i.e., name of provider, title, author, date, price, etc.). The article hyperlinks when selected trigger the payment and reveal the article content as shown in Figure 5. The bottom navigation links allow the user to navigate through the structure of the personal newspaper. The hyperlinks in the article content are regular WWW URLs offering the user the possibility to access directly

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any referenced material. The follow Up link denotes a link to a HyperNews resource. It is iden- tified by the "HN" chain logo next to it.

The Information Provider

The role of the information provider is to provide information consumers the information for which they have expressed interest. The information provider environment requires a set of tools in order to publish HyperNews articles over the network on a commercial basis. The three major

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tools of the information provider are the information classification builder tool, the information composition and publishing tool, and the information hyperlinker tool.

The information classification builder tool allows the provider to define the provider specific general information like pricing policy, revenue collection methods used, information classification etc. The information composition and publishing tool allows the publisher to compose an information unit by assembling independent elements (e.g. a picture in gifformat, an article in html, a Java applet etc.), define its characteristics, such as pricing information, authorization scheme, expiry date etc. and define the data encryption and key management scheme to use. The

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information hyper/inker tool offers the possibility ofhyperlinking published information to in- ternal or external information resources.

5 A Usage Scenario

A user wishing to read newspaper articles of an electronic newspaper will start by finding with his WWW browser the site of the electronic newspaper. There, a page will exist for Hyper News users to either download the HyperNews environment, in case they do not have it, or become

"potentially" new customers. By answering simple questions the resulting actions will be under- taken by the provider (i.e., environment or proxy downloading, subscription, etc.). A new user will then need to configure his environment information and presentation profiles, environment preferences. We expect that predefined general versions will be available from the publisher, so that the user only needs to modify them. Once the profiles are completed the user is ready to start receiving news articles. The newspaper's proxy agent or the default proxy agent will contact the newspaper server and download the articles (encapsulated in agents) which interest the user. The titles and other free information of the articles will then be displayed in the user's browser. By selecting any of the articles forreading, the electronic commerce agent will contact automatical- ly the credit institution and transfer the article fees. Alternatively, if a receipt for the article exists (i.e. the article was paid for in the past) the receipt will be sent to the credit institution for verification. Once the payment has been completed (or the receipt verified) the credit institution will send back to the commerce agent the keys required for the decryption of the article [22]. The commerce agent will then interact with the article agent, passing it the keys it just received and instruct it to decrypt the article, which will be finally displayed to the user. The article receipt, confirming the payment of the article, will be stored in the user's system in order to allow future access to the article. The receipt is composed of a public and a private part, where the public part identifies the corresponding article and the private part encapsulates the payment information.

To be noted that the private part of the receipt is encrypted by the credit institution and, depending on the credit institution's policy, it can include any kind of verification information. For off- line access smart cards of PCMCIA technology, like for example the ones developed in the COPYSMART [ 4] project, can be used. The smart card will play the role of the credit institution decrypting the articles keys and passing them to the commerce agent; however instead of transferring funds from the user's account to the information provider's account, it will decrease the available pre-paid amount.

If some important news become available while the user is connected to the network and the user has requested the news update service, a special agent will be sent by the publisher to the user's environment. Depending on how the user decided to be informed for breaking news, a flag might appear on his control panel, a window can be flashed or even a sound can be played.

This action is defined by the user in his preferences.

Once the article is displayed the user will be able to cut and paste the text or even take complete screen-dumps of the displayed information. However this action is costly (doing that for every article will take too much time), degrades the quality of the document (simple ASCII data in place of full graphics or low resolution screen dumps) and is comparable with the photocopy-

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J-H Morin and D. Konstantas ¹⁶¹ ing of printed documents, which publishers cannot prevent anyway. We believe that this is not an important problem (as photocopying of newspapers is not an important issue) and could be eliminated with the use of closed dedicated systems, like for example the Acom N ewsP AD [ l]

or similar devices.

6 Conclusions and Future Directions

The major problem in the commercialization of electronic documents is the enforcement of the copyright and the collection of the corresponding fees. Traditionally this is done at the distribution point of the document. That is, the user provides a password or enables an electronic payment using credit card or other electronic payment means, and receives a copy of the document.

The author relies on the goodwill of the user and on the penalties of the copyright laws that the electronic document is not copied thousands of times and distributed all over the world. Never- theless the circulating illegal copies are some times more than the legal ones. It is eventually for this reason that commercial electronic documents do not appear so often on the network.

The MEDIA system takes a different approach both at the representation of the electronic document and at the point of enforcement of the copyright and the collection of fees. MEDIA views electronic documents as agents (programs) that need to be interpreted in order to reveal their contents. This way since the electronic document is a program the document producer can include instructions not only for defining the structure of the information and how it should be displayed, but also code to interact with the reader asking for authorization passwords, verifying the integrity of its contents, decrypting sensitive parts of the document, etc. Furthermore ME- DIA enforces copyright control and collection offees not at the point of distribution of the electronic document but at the point of consumption. That is, the reader receives a document ( encapsulated in an agent) and only at the moment the user attempts to read it the copyright mechanisms are activated. If the user does not have or cannot obtain the required authorization, via some kind of payment mechanism, he cannot view the document contents, which are encrypted.

Nevertheless the reader can interact with the document and obtain some information about it before deciding to pay the price, like the title of the document, its author and maybe a small abstract of its contents.

The MEDIA system is based on an agent platform and namely on Java, which is extended and enhanced with agent programming features and libraries. The developed pilot application of the MEDIA system is HyperNews, an electronic newspaper. HyperNews is a commercial electronic newspaper allowing its readers to buy articles from different information providers ( electronic newspaper publishers) and compose their own personalized newspaper. The electronic newspaper readers can define the layout and presentation order of the articles, receive immediate updates of articles on evolving events, exchange articles with friends and colleagues without copyright law infringement and even become resellers of articles adding their own value added commentaries. The HyperNews system is programmed as a set of agents on top of the MEDIA core environment.

Our next step is to install for evaluation by the end of 1997, the HyperNews system in a commercial environment and namely at the site of the weekly magazine "L'Hebdo". The results

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of the evaluation will be used for the improvement of the system and further exploitation. In addition we will start working in the generalization of the HyperNews system for the distribution of arbitrary electronic documents, like books, reports etc. and multimedia information like music and video. For this we need to study the implications of the distribution of large documents (lOths ofMBs) over the internet (transfer speed for example).

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