BACKGROUND:
The entertainment industry is currently moving through a period of trial and error as it attempts to adapt to and capitalize on the market for digital copyrighted content. Old business models translated wholesale to the internet are proving inadequate, and new and hybrid business models are being suggested and tentatively applied.
As copyrighted content like music and film moves online and is accessible to millions of people worldwide, the debate between copyright owners and content consumers has grown fiercer – with the owners demanding stringent control over their property and consumers demanding convenient and affordable access to that property.
Enter – Digital Rights Management (DRM), the application of technology to control access to and use of digital content.
The perfect DRM has been the “holy grail” search of content owners since the advent of the internet. When one looks at the market for copyrighted content over the past two decades, the reason behind the search for the best DRM is clear.
Prior to the digital age, content owners had a monopoly on the original quality of their marketed goods. Users could obtain black market copies of the same goods, but the quality of those copies was usually guaranteed to be lower than that of the original.
Since the digital age, there is no longer a tradeoff between copying and quality. Today, lossless copies can be made, and content owners no longer have a monopoly on original quality.
The basic fear of digital content owners is that once they place a good in the stream of commerce, the market for exact copies will cannibalize the market for their original good. DRM is a way to protect the market for the original good.
DRM PRIMER INTRO:
Though there are many faces of DRM technology, most of them can be categorized into two general “modes” – hard and soft DRM.
Hard DRM encompasses technologies that place control over access, copying and distribution entirely in the hands of the copyright owner by giving them the tools to actually prevent unauthorized actions.
Soft DRM technologies do not prohibit unauthorized actions but merely monitor a user’s interaction with the content and transmit that information to the content owner. This information can then be used to selectively prosecute those users whose actions infringe the owner’s copyright.
Thus, a basic distinction between Hard and Soft DRM is that Hard DRM protects copyrights by preventing unauthorized actions before the fact, requiring users to get specific, prior permission for uses, while Soft DRM protects copyrights by giving copyright owners information about infringing uses after the fact.
Some of the primary methods of DRM include encryption, passwords, watermarks and fingerprints, but copy control flags, serial copy management systems (SCMS), authentication and revocation are also often applied.
In the context of DRM, encryption is the "scrambling of the bits that make up [digital] content to prevent the content from being seen clearly until it is descrambled (i.e. decrypted).” (see Marks & Turnbull, Technical Protection Measures: The Intersection of Technology, Law and Commercial Licenses, 22 EUR. INTELL. PROP. REV. 198, Annex A, 1-2 (2000)).
Passwords are used to prevent unauthorized access, and watermarks are used to stamp copyright notices and information on authorized digital content to distinguish it from unauthorized content. An alternative to watermarks are fingerprints – algorithms applied to content which create unique identification marks.
All this technology has fanned the flames between extremists on both sides of the copyright owner (control) and user (access) debate.
For Owner Extremists, DRM is the ultimate solution for the age old problem of control and the perfect means to lock out unauthorized users.
On the other hand, to User Extremists DRM is the ultimate evil in an age old problem of access and a nefarious means to block legitimate uses of content and to breach the privacy of users.
Legal realists and compromisers understand that DRM is here to stay and that copyright owners will not digitize their catalogues without some degree of protection. They also know that the most financially successful DRM models will be those that are most user-friendly, in terms of convenience, cost and restrictiveness.
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