With the advancement of digital computing, storage technology and widespread use of the Internet, Digital Libraries have become the state of the art libraries. CD-ROMs are replacing journals and books. Library users want information on-line. The successful growth and use of digital library will depend on the resolution of IPR issues in general and copyright issues in particular.

The traditional copyright provides that, in certain circumstances and under certain conditions it is not an infringement of copyright for public libraries or archives to distribute a copy of a work for reference and education. Browsing of books/printed material in book stores and libraries has been a legitimate intellectual interface with the author. This has been an important component of learning. Nevertheless, in the case of digital libraries, due to the fact that the digital media enables fast and unauthorised copies being taken, such an exemption is likely to be misused. With digital reference material being available through electronic media, suitable legislation may be required to ensure that the right to online browsing is retained.

The purpose of an ECMS is to aid enforcing the copyrights owned by the author, publisher etc., and to keep track upon the actions performed by an end user so that the appropriate royalties can be provided to the copyright owner. The design and development of an ideal Electronic Copyright Management System should address the following basic issues namely-

• Technical expression of copyrights - i.e., Making known to the end user that the copyrights are owned by the author etc., by utilising technological innovations.

• Automatic access control, licensing, collection of revenue by way of royalty, enforcing various rights, and monitoring various activities with a view to prevent infringement.

An ideal ECMS should evolve a mechanism for declaring the copyrights through explicit statements in machine readable formats. These copyright statements should embedded to the information objects. Machine readable copyright declarations/statements are instrumental in developing suitable systems for automatic access control, licensing, royalty revenue collection etc. Based on the above criteria, the components of a good ECMS could be:-

• a digital copyright registration and recording system
• a digital library system with aff‌iliated repositories of copyrighted works and
• a transaction monitoring system to check the illegal use of works.

Technologies are being developed for protecting electronic or machine readable copyright works. Explicit Copyright Control, Content Registration, Author Registration, Digital Watermarking etc, are some of the methods being tried upon to implement ECMS.