CUPID

Consortium for University Printing
and Information Distribution

Protocols and Services (Version 1):

An Architectural Overview

Future Extensions to Permission and Payment Servers

CUPID Version 1 offers only rudimentary capabilities to support such business functions as granting permissions and payment of royalties. These and related functions are assumed to be performed "out-of-band." Version 1 does support the transmission of information related to these functions via the appropriate Task definitions, but does not provide any control mechanisms.

Version 1 does lay the necessary groundwork, however, for extensions to support these business functions. In Section 6, it was noted that extending Version 1 from the "push" model to the "pull model" mostly consists of replacing Subdocument Files located in Printjobs on Origination Servers by pointers to those Subdocument Files wherever they may be located outside of CUPID. However, instead these pointers could just as well be to "permission servers" that perform gatekeeping functions and in turn contain pointers to the Subdocument Files that they control. They can also point to corresponding "terms and condition servers" that contain business-related information on the payment and other conditions governing the printing of the associated Subdocuments. Finally, in conjunction with information contained in the Printjob Order, they can also point to designated "payment servers" that can cause the specified royalties or other payments to be charged to particular Customer accounts.

These functions are all kept separate to allow for greater generality. For example, one clearing-house may be able to clear a given set of Subdocuments in a manner defined by its permission server and terms-and-conditions server. The same set of documents could also be cleared by another clearing house through a different permission server and terms-and-conditions-server. The particular payment server defined will normally depend upon both the clearing-house (which could be the Publisher) and on the particular customer being charged.

It is likely that a server containing Subdocuments can contain pointers to the permission servers that can "clear" those documents.

The precise definitions of and architectural relationships among these server concepts is beyond the scope of this Version 1 overview. However, the foregoing sketch is consistent with Version 1 and the detailed extensions should not be overly complex.

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