Digital Rights Management (DRM)

While not perfect, Digital Rights Management technology provides a convenient and secure way to enjoy the use of your valuable intellectual property by consumers who have obtained it legitimately, while preventing it's viewing and duplication by those who have not. MediaCinch provides DRM services that can be used in the following scenarios:

Subscription Services:
Until recently, subscription content has not been easily transferable to portable devices. MediaCinch now provides technology that allows this to happen, making subscriptions more valuable to customers. Customers can download almost limitless items through their subscription, play them as often as desired, and transfer them to any device. These tracks are linked to licenses that have start and end dates. At the end of the billing period, the customer connects to the content service provider where licenses are automatically renewed, as long as the customer has paid the fee. Otherwise, the licenses simply expire.

Purchase Single Tracks:
In this scenario, customers purchase and download tracks protected with MediaCinch from content service providers on a per-track basis as opposed to the subscription model.

Rental Services:
Many customers download movies on a rental basis over the Internet to their computers. MediaCinch makes this possible by providing time-limited licenses. This means that movie download services can create licenses that satisfy customer-viewing habits while ensuring that the content is used in the way the content owners intended. For example, a customer might rent a movie that allows him to begin viewing it anytime within 30 days, and for 48 hours once they start playing it. This content is transferable to portable devices that support video playback.

Video-On-Demand (Pay-Per-View):
MediaCinch supports pay-per-view playback on computers and extends this capability to set-top boxes (i.e., DVR) so content can be viewed and licensed over a cable network in addition to being played back through a computer.

Live DRM: Real Time Events:
With MediaCinch , content owners can deliver protected live digital media content such as news, rock concerts, or sporting events over the Internet in real time, without requiring that the content first be batched and saved. For example, a music company could offer customers a customizable concert package with a choice of upcoming performances. Once the transaction is complete, customers can watch the protected live performances streamed over the Internet as they occur.

Preview and Purchase Content:
Using MediaCinch , a retail Web site can offer customers the option to preview songs before buying them. For example, customers are allowed to download any song and play it a certain number of times in exchange for registering with the service. The next time customers attempt to listen to the song, they are taken directly to the seller's Web site where they are instructed on how to purchase the song. In this scenario, content owners are able to promote their recording artists and albums on the Internet while cutting down on marketing costs.

One File, Different Licenses:
With MediaCinch , a retail Web site can offer customers a choice of licenses when purchasing content. For example, for a small fee, customers can play the song for one month. For a larger fee, they can play the song forever and transfer the song to a portable device. If they choose the latter, MediaCinch Manager issues a license to them with no expiration date that also includes the right to play the file on a portable audio device.

Protection of Sensitive Material:
Companies can protect sensitive digital media property, such as recorded presentations, by using MediaCinch . For instance, employees that are unable to attend a company conference can view the recorded event later. Because the company doesn't want the information to leak out to its competitors, it has protected the streamed content by using MediaCinch . When the employees select to view the presentation from their computers, a one-time license for the content is issued silently, and the video begins streaming.

Distance Learning:
A university or school can save videos of lectures, presentations and discussions and encrypt them by using MediaCinch so they can be streamed or downloaded to students' computers after the acquisition of a license. The student logs in, and a license is sent to her computer. The university uses the license as an attendance record and also for billing purposes.

MediaCinch

Enterprise security isn't working. As companies install ever more advanced firewalls and anti-virus software, the outpouring of sensitive data goes on and on.

Last year, 446 companies suffered data breaches, up from 312 the year before, losing a total of 127 million individuals' records, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. This year may outpace even those grim numbers, in quantity of breaches if not in volume of records lost: 224 companies lost consumer or employee data in the first four months of this year, a total of 11 million records by the ITRC's count.

hat means the old protection strategy of trying to harden the outside of companies' networks to protect against hacker threats--what security researcher Bill Cheswick once called the "crunchy outside with a soft, chewy center" approach--is giving way to a new strategy: safeguarding the data itself. Instead of trying to fortify the perimeter of the company's network, some security technologies are aiming to evaluate the sensitivity of individual pieces of information and then apply security directly to movable chunks of information.

"Information-centric security is about taking a risk-based approach to protecting confidential information," Symantec chief executive John Thompson said in his keynote address at the RSA conference in April. "With the amount of stored data growing 50 per cent a year, trying to protect it all is both inefficient and costly. Instead, it's about securing the most critical information, from source code to customer records to employee data."

Thompson went on to dredge up an unpopular term in the world of information technology: digital rights management. DRM, long associated with much-loathed restrictions on music and video, is regaining momentum in enterprise security by playing a similar role: putting metatags on files to determine how they can be used. Placing a DRM tag on a personal file in a company, for instance, might allow those in human resources to open it, but not someone in sales.

Another metatag might allow the sales group to edit and e-mail a document, but the engineers can only print it. DRM software is built by such companies as Microsoft and Waltham, Mass.-based software firm Liquid Machines.

Those systems may sound like snarls of red tape. But to one start-up still in stealth mode, Jerusalem-based Secure Islands, they suggested a new solution: embedding security directly in data. Secure Islands, funded partly by Israeli security guru Shlomo Kramer, builds software designed to classify sensitive information automatically based on policies outlined by a company, and then to wrap it in the appropriate level of DRM.

Any file that contains a credit card number, for instance, can be automatically tagged with restrictions that encrypt it when it's put on a USB drive. Or, if that same information is shared within a company, the applicable rules might prevent those who see it from cutting and pasting any of the names and addresses.

The goal, says Unisys chief security architect and blogger Chris Hoff, is to make the security go where the data goes, rather than keeping data tied to secure locations. "Instead of putting a security guard at the door, it's like putting a bodyguard on every piece of information," he says.

Secure Islands leaves the actual encryption to industry leaders such as PGP or Microsoft. The company using the technology sets the rules that restrict how the data can be used. Secure Islands categorizes the data and then applies the appropriate doses of encryption and DRM.

"Those companies provide the engine," says Yuval Eldar, one of the two brothers who founded the company in late 2006. "We provide the steering and the wheels. We try to make encryption or DRM go wherever you want it to."

Another host of companies aim to monitor data as it flows in and out of networks--including through USB ports, e-mail, file transfer protocol and Web browsers. This trend, called "data loss prevention" (DLP), similarly classifies data. It also monitors data leaving a company's network, blocking the movement of sensitive data or encrypting it.

Over the past year, practically every major security vendor has acquired one of the small companies selling DLP software. In the space of two months, beginning last August, Trend Micro acquired a small DLP vendor called Provilla, McAfee bought a similar company called SafeBoot, and Symantec paid $350 million for DLP firm Vontu.

A lesser-known but equally data-centric segment of the security industry involves monitoring the activity that happens around databases and major applications. For instance, Waltham, Mass.-based Guardium and Tel Aviv, Israel-based Imperva offer software that classifies data by modeling their movement and watching for anomalies that might be signs of penetrations or insider misbehavior.

That kind of monitoring, contends Imperva spokesman Mark Kraynak, could have prevented Société Générale's Jerome Kerviel from hiding his secret trades, or Enron's accountants from sneaking adjustments into their financial numbers in the company's database. But the first step, says Kraynak, is sifting through your company's information to determine what needs monitoring or protection.

"Find your sensitive data," says Kraynak. "Many organizations don't know where it is. Companies tell me they have three systems with credit card data. We go in and find that there are 50."

The security industry's growing effort to automatically categorize sensitive data won't be easy, says Forrester Research analyst Jonathan Penn. While information that can identify individuals--such as credit card and Social Security numbers--can be spotted by software, data such as a company's source code or business plans aren't as easily sifted out.

Nonetheless, Penn says that information-centric security is a better plan than focusing on an entire network. "The boil-the-ocean approach isn't going to work," he says.

Information-centric security won't stop all data leaks, says Rich Mogull, an independent security consultant and founder of Securosis. But the overall movement toward protecting information rather than building walls around networks is a major step in reducing risk, he says.

"In a 7-Eleven, there's never more than a few hundred dollars in the register. The rest is in the safe, and even that's guarded by cameras," Mogull says. "Companies are applying risk-reduction controls to our sensitive information based on the information itself. That's why this is so different."

DRM and electronic books could help lower college educational expenses while at the same time improving the health of students.

Here's why: the economics of textbook publishing are broken. There's a reason that an introductory biology textbook costs $125 new, and it's not because it's printed on high-quality paper using a special 12-color press. It's because when the student is done with the book, he or she sells it back to the campus bookstore, or to another student. The publisher is thus deprived of recurring revenue on the title. So it raises book prices, heaping the revenue it would get from multiple students over multiple years onto one unlucky soul. But the more expensive books get, the more likely students are to recycle them. It's a death spiral of cost.

This is how digital rights and e-books can help: what if, instead of selling paper books to students, publishers sold digital copies? Already some textbooks are available online or in downloads, but students need easier access to information than a standard 7-pound, battery-limited laptop can provide. An instant-on electronic book is just the ticket. The technology is here, or nearly so. If the textbook content was licensed to the user and not resellable, then the publisher could sell it to each individual who needed it. There'd be no secondary market and the publishers would not have to inflate their prices to make up for that.

And the health benefits? It's a lot better for your back if you're just carrying one 3-pound e-book instead of a half-dozen 8-pound printed texts.

Now, there are dozens of ways publishers could screw this up, mostly by overpricing their content, which would encourage hacking of the DRM, which would in response lead to onerous copy protection that could make e-books unworkable. But if--and it's a big if--publishers get on board and start selling licenses to their texts instead of the books themselves, everyone (except bookstores) could benefit. I would be surprised if e-book manufacturers weren't pushing on this angle right now. See the hands-on hardware and software reviews of Sony's new PRS-505 electronic book.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is inconvenient, and it actually prevents us from exercising some content rights we've gotten use to. It also may be that the Internet has to accept DRM for a greater good, and not just for the artists or the producers -- but for the Internet itself. DRM may be critical in preserving the role of the Internet in delivering video content. It may also be vital to insuring that advertisers really fund the content delivery process. DRM may well be "Net neutrality insurance."

The Net neutrality debate centers on whether broadband access providers should be forced to share high-quality bandwidth capable of supporting video streaming with over-the-top players, without charging for it. Today, most people probably realize that's not going to happen, but it doesn't mean the Internet loses. There isn't anything to show that we have to "stream" video to consume it anyway. That's the broadcast paradigm, and this is the online age, remember?

The Internet needs its own paradigm. In fact, it has one, and it's called "downloading stuff." Everyone does it almost daily. Downloaded music replaced buying CDs, so it's only logical that downloading video could replace DVDs. The barrier here isn't bandwidth, because it would never take more bandwidth to download something than it would to stream it -- and it could take a lot less time.

Downloading video eliminates quality of service (QOS) problems, too. Downloading and storing video opens a completely new TV model, one where every user's video storage device creates a kind of personal TV network. Imagine "TV shows" downloaded automatically to set-top boxes and released for viewing on the "broadcast" schedule. Imagine ad insertion that was truly personalized. The process would involve ads broadcast to your home, with an in-home device selecting ads based on your demographics, so nobody outside the home even knows what your demographics are. It could all happen... except for the whole DRM debate.

If we could get a logical DRM strategy that the Internet community and content providers alike could support, we could promote a downloaded video model that would turn the Internet into the No. 1 source of video content, including cable TV, satellite TV, broadcast, and so forth. Each show could have a "first-available-at" time so you couldn't try to view it before release. Other than that, shows could be scheduled when you want, and you could change your mind.

The most common solution to DRM today, the strategy Netflix Inc. uses, for example, is streaming the video, so it's never stored. That's what gets into QOS and Net neutrality. Fix DRM and you don't need walled IPTV gardens. There are DRM schemes that do seem to strike a balance between fair use and content protection. FairPlay from Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) is an example that the recent iTunes deal with 20th Century Fox shows the studios can accept.

There are DRM systems for DVDs, too, and if the studios would let users recover a lost or broken DVD at cost of shipping, they could also support Fair Use policies. We need a DRM scheme that works both ways, something that lets a user download or buy video, write or copy a DVD, and have the DRM of a new disc still be enforceable. Rumor says that both Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Sony Corp. (NYSE: SNE) are working on schemes to do this.

The debate over Net neutrality is the wrong debate, because it's one that casts the Internet as an alternative to other delivery models like satellite or radio frequency, models the Internet can't be cost-competitive against. That sparks everyone's concern about cost and profit. The Internet has to change the rules, not play by the rules of old media. Like it or not, DRM is the key to making the notion of "new media" real.

- Tom Nolle, Software engineer and founder of CIMI Corp. 1/30/08

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