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This is an essay talking about DRM systems, which can give you an overview of the lock up system.

A new feature on the Google toolbar-which is installed on millions of computers around the world-lets users comment about the content of any web page they visit; the comments are then visible to other toolbar owners when they visit that site (see screenshot to the left).

While current computing practice abounds with innovations like online auctions, blogs, wikis, twitter, social networks and online social games, few if any genuinely new theories have taken root in the corresponding "top" academic journals. Those creating computing progress increasingly see these journals as unreadable, outdated and irrelevant. Yet as technology practice creates, technology theory is if anything becoming even more conforming and less relevant. We attribute this to the erroneous assumption that research rigor is excellence, a myth contradicted by the scientific method itself. Excess rigor supports the demands of appointment, grant and promotion committees, but is drying up the wells of academic inspiration. Part I of this paper chronicles the inevitable limits of what can only be called a feudal academic knowledge exchange system, with trends like exclusivity, slowness, narrowness, conservatism, self-involvement and inaccessibility. We predict an upcoming social upheaval in academic publishing as it shifts from a feudal to democratic form, from knowledge managed by the few to knowledge managed by the many. The technology trigger is socio-technical advances. The drive will be that only democratic knowledge exchange can scale up to support the breadth, speed and flexibility modern cross-disciplinary research needs. Part II suggests the sort of socio-technical design needed to bring this transformation about.

The reputation of Germany's higher education system has been shaken by the revelation that investigators are looking into a PhD scam in which professors were paid to help students gain their doctorates.

Google's Android operating system for mobile phones will be available on the Verizon Wireless network

Today, users are adding metadata and using tags to organize their own digital collections, categorize the content of others and build bottom-up classification systems.

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has developed a new system that allows non-Latin characters to be used in domain name extensions. This is an interesting progress as it will be beneficial for non-English users. But it surely will face many challenges.