On 29 June, CLSI implemented the first phase of its digital rights management (DRM) plan for electronic documents customers and members receive via the CLSI website. DRM is being instituted to help protect the intellectual property of its standards and guidelines.

The importance of protecting copyrighted material distributed through the Internet is a major issue for organizations today. Many CLSI volunteers and authors contribute a tremendous amount of time and expertise to develop its documents, and sales of those documents are the major source of revenue to drive CLSI’s not-for-profit mission. 
 
The initial step in implementing DRM is adding a watermark to electronic documents. The watermark will display red text using variable information along the bottom of every page of a document as follows:
 
The first line displays:
"Licensed to: Full Name Organization. Single User License only."
 
The second line displays:
“Copying and networking prohibited. CLSI order # 99999, id # 999999, downloaded on day month year.”
 
A watermark also will appear on CLSI’s inventory of ISO documents to comply with ISO's policy for resellers.
  
If you have any questions or comments on the watermarking project or DRM, please feel free to contact CLSI staff at customerservice@clsi.org.

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