Safeguarding and charging for information on the Internet

With the growing acceptance of the Internet as a new dissemination medium, several new and interesting challenges arise in building a digital commerce infrastructure. We discuss some of the issues that arise in building such an infrastructure. In particular, we study how one can find and pay for digital information, and how one can safeguard the information from invalid access and duplication. We use examples from our Stanford Digital Library Project to illustrate some of these problems and their potential solutions.