1. Full Artistic Control: Open Source CMS allows Artist-Hackers to get under the hood to change themes, graphics, UI, sound quality, modules, etc.

2. Distribution: Open Source CMS coupled with RDF/RSS fosters efficient searches and syndication on the semantic web, and thus effective distribution.

3. DRM: Open Source CMS coupled with an extensible rights language such as the CC licenses expressed in RDF/RSS allows a full spectrum of rights definitions in parallel with distribution. Open security standards and protocols afford financial transactions, secure delivery, and trusted ratings for marketplaces and content.

There are great divides in the contemporary media industry. Many companies and individuals are finding themselves on the wrong side of the laws--Moore's Law, Metcalfe's Law, and Constitutional Law. Authena is devoted to keeping artists and entreprenuers on the right side of the laws. The Open Source Content Management System (CMS) renaissance is under way, and with a few clicks of the mouse or a bit of PHP, you can begin leveraging its vast power to host your band's site, to share or sell your photography, to display your art, to organize and stream your music, to set up a record label or publishing house, and to have fun pursuing your artistic dreams. Simply put, Open Source has moved beyond the operating system, and is now bringing its classic robustness and freedom to content management systems--many are listed in the right hand column.
Gone are the days when we logged on to merely set up a web page or share our poetry. Today, with Open Source CMS, one can become a record label, publisher, distribution center, and media conglomerate. The software is still a bit "hackeresque," but Authena is aiming to help streamline it, highlight the coolest applications, and bundle them with open standards for digital rights management (DRM). Check back here early and often for the latest in how you can manage your creations online.

Some early demos of 1-click Open Source CMS software include mobynuke.net, pnavy.com, and 22blog.com, 22photo.com. And VVgallery can be demoed and downloaded here. And yes, we're tackling film too at docfound.com.

By providing a set of modules and an architectural philosophy for generating RDF/RSS descriptions incorporating the Dublin Core and the extensible Creative Commons licenses, Authena seeks to marry a full spectrum of rights definitions to Open Source CMS. A second set of modules capable of reading RSS feeds and retrieving rights descriptions and content via a REST protocol will enable syndicated content distribution across a network of CMS. Modules capable of generating RDF rights descriptions and embedding them in media and RSS feeds allow media shops, galleries, and content repositories to syndicate media via a REST protocol. Individual creators, businesses, and institutions hosting content in Open Source CMS can syndicate it to OSS repositories or marketplaces endowed with transaction and royalty-tracking capabilities. Repositories and marketplaces can in turn syndicate their content to yet other markets and repositories while preserving rights descriptions and recording transactions, affording a decentralized distribution model that binds the rights description to the actual medium of syndication. Whereas RSS is generally used for syndicating newsfeeds, Authena uses RSS to syndicate rights information and links to digital media in different formats, including thumbnailed, watermarked, and high-quality originals in secure directories, so as to facilitate the indexing, harvesting, and selling of content on the semantic web in accordance with rights defined by the creator.

Early Authena clients and servers include modified versions of Gallery and Oscommerce, represented at http://pnavy.com/dcgallery and http://vvgallery.org.

Digital rights specifications are exchanged with RSS/RDF feeds, and a central commerce engine (powered by Oscommerce for instance) may sell digital content from hundreds of satellite clients (powered by gallery). Authena servers manage digital rights and facilitate financial transactions pertaining to content hosted by Authena clients, which consist of open content management systems empowered with Authena modules. Digital rights are marked up in the Dublin Core and other open specifications. The Creative Commons licenses are integrated within the Authena standard. Authena aims to keep abreast of evolving DRM standards and protocols, including ODRL, the Dublin Core, IMS, XKMS, Palladium, OKI, and the Liberty Alliance.

A window exists for the open source community to marry digital rights management (DRM) to content management systems (CMS) such as postnuke, gallery, tikiwiki, and oscommerce. Authena is devoted to fostering the development of an open DRM system which will allow creators to be compensated for their works or place them in the public domain. We have some ideas of what the code might look like, and we'll be sharing them here soon. If you have any ideas, please submit them! Let us know if you come across anything cool at sourceforge or freshmeat!

Open Source DRM may be the final frontier in liberating the control of content from media goliaths. Though it may seem counter-intuitive that the open-source community would further a DRM system, it actually makes perfect sense. While open source is best suited to massive projects supporting objective functionality such as operating systems and complex applications, intellectual property which relies on the individual's vision, such as photographs, paintings, novels, songs, and poems, is often better encouraged by a DRM system which allows the creator to define the rights and be compensated.

The only place the word "right" appears in the United States Constitution is in the following passage:

The Congress shall have Power To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

This sounds like a pretty good idea. If artists, authors, and inventors are compensated for their creative endeavors, they'll have incentive to enrich everyone's lives with their creations.

Unfortunately, what started out as a good idea has been leveraged by certain lawyers, bureaucrats, and corporations to enrich themselves at the expense of artists, creators, and the public. Now we're not railing against all lawyers nor big businesses, but we think it'd be cool if some of the middlemen were bypassed so that artists didn't have to pay the "bureaucracy tax" to have their works distributed.

The traditional New York media companies do provide a certain degree of quality control, but like all aging old-boys clubs, they pad their books and CDs with nepotism, politics, and postmodern pretentiousness, and they charge you extra for the service.

Many of them fear the free marketplace fostered by the internet, because out here people don't pay quite as much for hype. But in actuality, the internet is the honest businessman's best friend--it's the greatest mechanism for content distribution in all of history. And there's no reason why every artist and creator shouldn't become their own distributor, and pocket a bit more of the revenue generated by their creative endeavors.

The creative arts naturally gravitate towards the free market, and where so many proprietary systems have fallen short, open source has a chance of triumphing. An open DRM standard has the best chance of widespread adoption, and thus corporations shall follow the lead of the open source community.

It is in the best interest of large companies such as Microsoft to have everyone using their standards, but in an open and free society, that is not reason enough for standards to prevail. Standards which empower the lone artist and intellectual will triumph because they're simple and elegant, and because they provide a mechanism by which the creative individual may be compensated.

And so it is that Authena is dedicated to serving the original spirit of the Constitution by providing an Open Source DRM system in conjunction with Open Source CMS. If you can make a few bucks here and there off of your creative efforts, or publish a bestseller to the world without asking some New York marketing manager's permission, then we'll know we've succeeded.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.