Digital Rights Management - Protecting Your Content, Part 1

One of the supreme powers of the Internet is that it enables the instant publication of content. Anything you’d want to use to help promote your business — press releases, newsletters, e-books, white papers, etc. — can be easily and quickly uploaded to your site to help keep it fresh and informative. This also, unfortunately, makes the Internet a magnet for hackers and plagiarists who want to copy and distribute your content for their own gain. By law, you own the content you produce and it is covered under copyright protection. Today, let’s look at some of the technical ways to protect your Internet content. Our next issue will feature Part Two of this article: legal means of digital content protection.

A new term that has been coined to describe online content protection is “Digital Rights Management” (DRM). According to one DRM technology solutions provider, InterTrust, “DRM applies to any business with sensitive or confidential information, with the need to protect high-value digital assets, with the need to control the distribution and usage of those assets, or with the need to automate important processes operating on the computing resources of multiple parties.”

When it comes to graphics and text, one of the simplest, but certainly not the best solution involves using JavaScript to disable the user’s right-click option and warn him that the content he is trying to copy is copyrighted material. A savvy plagarist can still view your source code and copy whatever it is he wants, hence, the less-than-ideal Javascript solution.

One way to share content with added security is to invest in a proprietary file viewer that will allow you more control over whom gets your content and what they can do with it. Most of these technologies employ some kind of encryption.

One of the more well-known examples is Adobe. These days, most Internet users are familiar with Adobe Acrobat software (the power behind PDF files). Adobe now offers a system, Adobe Content Server, that not only allows you to distribute files or ebooks (PDFs) directly from any web site, but also to then track and control the “unauthorized mass distribution and potential copyright infringements” of your file.

With systems like Adobe, you can limit the user’s ability to print pages, copy text, and even disallow automatic audio interpretation. Adobe’s system comes with helpful advanced user functionality such as the ability to change the font to suit one’s reading preference, to instantly look up dictionary definitions of words and phrases, to highlight sections of text or to add bookmarks for quick access.

Another, even more restrictive DRM solutions provider is eBook Pro Viewer. The combination of their software and site administration gives you the power to control such things as activating or de-activating copies of your ebook, limiting the number of times users can view it, the copying and pasting of your content, enabling/disabling the printing of your ebook, and exactly what personal information you require from your customers in order for them to even gain access to your content. Furthermore, a reader may only access the file on the computer to which it’s originally downloaded.

InterTrust, the DRM company mentioned earlier, offers a technology called “Rights|System” to encrypt and protect digital content of any kind (music, video or text) specifically for sale. The content you wish to distribute gets encrypted and sent to a retailer’s or distributor’s content distribution system while, at the same time the usage rules for the content are sent to a special server. Once the purchase is approved, the server issues an authorization which allows the recipient to access the content. An authorized user can pass along the content to others, but upon doing so, those others are then directed to an appropriate source where they would need to purchase the access rights.

Alchemedia, another company, has created a product called Mirage that blocks common replication functionalities like screen captures, printing/saving/forwarding, and copy/paste and instead displays encrypted jargon to the offender.

Finally, a special development language has entered the DRM arena. Called “eXtensible rights Markup Language” (XrML) and meant to be “a universal method for securely specifying and managing rights and conditions associated with all kinds of resources including digital content as well as services,” XrML is currently governed by ContentGuard, a DRM company. XrML is free, though there may be fees associated with the intended use, which is covered by ContentGuard patents.

Next issue: Protecting Your Content, Part Two - Legal Ways

Related WebAdvantage.net articles:

WebAdvantage.net’s “Capitalizing on Content“

Related Links:

JavaScript for Disabling Right Click on Images
Adobe Acrobat
eBook Pro Viewer
Content Guard
XrML - The Digital Rights Language
InterTrust Technologies Corporation
Alchemedia’s Mirage

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