Copyright also includes moral rights, which refer to the integrity of a work protected by copyright. The author of a work always holds the moral rights since they cannot be assigned. In Canada, however, moral rights can be waived. There are effectively three types of moral rights in Canada: the right to paternity, integrity of the work and the right of association. The right of paternity is the right to claim authorship or to remain anonymous or use a pseudonym regardless of the ownership of the copyright. The right of integrity prevents the mutilation or manipulation and perhaps even the destruction of a work that may be the author's prejudice regardless of whether the changes mentioned above are made to the original or a copy. The right of association allows the author to prevent the use of a work by another if such use runs contrary to the author's wishes, such as an association with a product, service, cause or institution.

It was held recently in an American case that compilations of images of artworks in the public domain could not be afforded copyright protection, since the digitized images lacked sufficient originality to meet the standards required by copyright law. The decision in Bridgeman Art Library Ltd. v Corel, ¹ (Bridgeman), determined that the more faithful a reproduction of an artwork is to the original work, the less copyrightable it becomes, because such reproductions are not in and of themselves intellectual creations. The court made the analogy that a photograph of a two-dimensional artwork entirely faithful to the original was similar to a photocopy. It is understood that this decision will not be appealed. Although this decision is part of American case law, there is a small chance that it could be adopted in Canada, given certain similarities in our copyright laws, as explicitly recognized by the Federal Court of Canada in the Tele-Direct case, discussed below.

Amendments to Canada's Copyright Act ⁴ in 1997 introduced specific exceptions to copyright for educational institutions and museums, archives, and libraries, which are exempted from copyright violation if they make a copy of a work in order to manage or maintain their respective collections or carry out limited interlibrary loans. Maintaining and managing a collection is defined by the legislation as making a copy of a work where:

• The original is rare or unpublished, deteriorating or lost, or is at risk of being damaged, deteriorating or lost,
• The original cannot be viewed or handled owing to its delicate state, and a copy is required for on-site consultation,
• The original is currently in an obsolete format, or the technology required to use the original is unavailable,
• The copy is required for internal recordkeeping and cataloguing,
• The copy is required for insurance purposes or police investigations, or
• The copy is necessary for restoration purposes.

Exceptions to copyright are also provided to educational institutions for use of works inside a classroom or as part of an examination. ⁴ Museums, libraries, and archives that are part of educational institutions may avail themselves of all of the exceptions. Certain exceptions for all these groups apply only when a copy of the work in question is not "commercially available".

While images can also be protected and managed to some degree using current technologies, technology alone will not sufficiently protect digitised images. A combination of both legal and technology methods are required to protect digitised images from copyright infringement. Notwithstanding, even in combination, there are no guarantees that any image on the Internet is 100 percent protected, although an adequate combination of both legal and technology protections will provide a certain level of comfort. Finally, keep in mind that low-resolution thumbnail images are extremely difficult to reproduce because of their small scale.

While digital technologies create powerful new forms of preservation of text and images, and distribution of reproductions, at the same time they engender difficult problems involving intellectual property (IP) rights. It is becoming clear that amending and extending copyright legislation alone will not resolve this problem, if it can be resolved at all. For works distributed over networks, the model of licensing to end-users, as is done in the software industry, alleviates some problems, but will require a moderate approach on the part of owners, and an emphasis on the education of end-users.

Licensing, even if supported by registration, is seen as providing too little protection for aesthetic goods that retain their value over a long period. Hence, the issue of protection of digital images has attracted considerable attention, and a number of technologies, including watermarking, encryption, digital signatures, and fingerprinting, have been developed and are being marketed.

In their current implementations watermarks, signatures, and fingerprints primarily have value as deterrents to misuse and copyright infringement. Encryption can achieve high levels of security but even there the protection is never absolute and museums that implement such technologies must allow for ongoing infringements, usually at low levels with little economic consequences. On balance, the best strategy in the short term will be to keep the burden of protection technologies as light as possible within the legal requirements, and secure protection against economic loss through simple user licensing agreements constructed and enforced online for specific works and for specific times.

In the long run, what will count for users is ease of access, variety and comprehensiveness within a given domain. Since this is best achieved in a highly distributed, networked environment, there arises an acute need for computer systems that can manage "rights" - or more specifically, intellectual property (IP). A software technology on which such systems can be constructed is under active development and deployment, in the form of component software architectures. Examples are "Network OLE" (Microsoft), "CORBA" (Object Management Group) and "JavaBeans" (Sun Microsystems). Out of the software components defined in these architectures, IP management systems (IPMS) build secure containers of encrypted content that contain the information and updating mechanisms the IPMS uses to enforce license terms, log usage, transmit royalty data to copyright collectives, and bill consumers.