As far as I'm aware, the core issue here is with the copyright holders. The vast majority of them won't accept a non-DRM solution, and as far as I'm aware, there's no open-source DRM solutions.
There's a fundamental problem with digital data and DRM that never goes away - if you can view the thing, you can (and must have) copied it into an unencrypted form at some point. So if you have an open-source DRM solution, most probably someone can clone your DRM solution, pretend to be doing DRM properly, then in fact just copy the content at whatever point it becomes unprotected so you can view it.
It's a difficult problem - on the one hand, content creators should be rewarded, on the other hand, digital copies of content are trivial to produce to the point of basically being almost free to store and transmit... and all our rules about copyright are based on the physical world where copies are hard to produce.
This pretty much causes all the broken when it comes to the rules around copyright. :-/
Possibly more on topic to your actual question, but unfortunately not actually open source products:
EZProxy? It's not really a lending solution, more of an authenticated proxied-access solution, but maybe of interest?
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: October 4th, 2011 05:48 am (UTC)There's a fundamental problem with digital data and DRM that never goes away - if you can view the thing, you can (and must have) copied it into an unencrypted form at some point. So if you have an open-source DRM solution, most probably someone can clone your DRM solution, pretend to be doing DRM properly, then in fact just copy the content at whatever point it becomes unprotected so you can view it.
It's a difficult problem - on the one hand, content creators should be rewarded, on the other hand, digital copies of content are trivial to produce to the point of basically being almost free to store and transmit... and all our rules about copyright are based on the physical world where copies are hard to produce.
This pretty much causes all the broken when it comes to the rules around copyright. :-/
Possibly more on topic to your actual question, but unfortunately not actually open source products: