Express your Rights

Just as the deadbolt on your front door can be picked by a burglar, digital protection can be broken by a "cracker." The difference is that the cracker will use the Web to invite hundreds of millions of people to come into your (virtual) living room and take what they want. If you’re an owner or distributor of valuable intellectual property — be it music, movies, animations or any other media asset — this is a direct threat to your bottom line, and to the integrity of your copyrights.

But just as digital media delivery has increased the potential damage of copyright theft exponentially, it also affords huge opportunities for generating revenue. Some recent high-profile mergers in the digital music distribution space attest to this fact, but this is really only the beginning. What is required to make digital delivery — via streaming or download — a truly attractive option for content owners is reliable digital rights management solutions.

DRM is an umbrella term for a number of capabilities that allow digital product owners the means to decide under what conditions people can acquire, use, copy, loan and sell their products. Candidates for protection include software programs, legal documents, electronic books or magazines, songs or collections of songs, films and other digital assets.

DRM can serve many purposes, but when it comes to Internet delivery of audio and visual content, one stands out like a sore thumb — making money. Although MP3 songs are merely part of a much bigger digital media picture, Napster has proven to the world that unfathomable numbers of people will take stuff without paying, and will keep doing it if there are no barriers or legal consequences. Legal action is a deterrent against those facilitating widespread piracy, but it’s not a realistic recourse against the tens of millions of people downloading billions of songs per day without paying. So content owners must fend for themselves.

While the movie, TV and music industries hold many of the big content cards, a battle for a piece of the rights-selling and rights-management action is raging between ISPs (cable, satellite, wireless and DSL), phone companies, technology vendors, Web sites, small content owners, streaming companies, and others. Content owners and distributors need to understand the components, capabilities and limitations of DRM to navigate the impending marketplace madness.

Encryption

The first and most basic element of DRM is encryption. Without encryption, content owners are inviting pirates to board the cargo ship before it even leaves the dock. With encryption, they’ll have to go through a heck of a lot of trouble to steal your digital booty.

The intent of encryption is to make piracy too difficult and troublesome for all but the most dyed-in-the-wool crackers to bother. Encryption developers are "in the business of putting up speed bumps," says Julia Fenster, vice president of film, video and broadcasting at Reciprocal, a DRM and e-commerce clearinghouse. Ranjit Singh, president and chief operating officer of ContentGuard, a DRM company based in Bethesda, Md., describes DRM encryption as "keeping the honest people honest."

Encryption is exceedingly difficult to break. (See sidebar, page 40.) Frequently, however, people break into systems by stealing passwords and other "decryption codes" — not by actually "breaking" the technology in its entirety. For instance, the best-known encryption "crack" is the breaking of the CSS encryption scheme used to lock down DVD content. But that crack was only possible because one of the CSS licensees inadvertently neglected to encrypt the decryption key. It was not the result of breaking encryption, but the result of password theft — a much easier proposition for a pirate.

There are other ways thieves can steal keys for decryption. For instance, because a personal computer must send unencrypted data to output devices such as audio cards and video boards, crackers have written a number of "dummy" drivers that act like audio or video boards but whose real purpose is to write the unencrypted content to disk. Microsoft has implemented its "Secure Audio Path" feature into Windows, allowing content distributors to disable this. But unfortunately, Secure Audio Path is not in Windows NT, Windows 95, or Windows 98. Until the world upgrades to Windows ME/2000/XP, this vulnerability will remain widespread.

There will always be crackers who break systems, and there will always be corporations trying to stay one step ahead of them. DRM solutions are based on the principle that if it’s hard enough, most people won’t bother to steal – they’ll just pay.