The Long View
Weighing the benefits of DRM ultimately means finding a balance between cost trade-offs. It's possible that your current approach is satisfactory and exposes you to minimal risks and costs. But even though the startup and life cycle costs of a DRM solution can be expensive, you must weigh these costs in turn against the potential cost of not protecting and not managing access to your media.
Regardless of a given solution's sophistication, there will always be those who manage to defeat or exploit the mechanism. As soon as measures are applied to make a DRM technology more secure, enterprising hackers start looking for holes in the new approach. Although this cycle is inevitable, it does not mean that there's no market for DRM. Satellite TV signal protection, for example, has repeatedly been circumvented, but the business thrives nonetheless. Most satellite TV users simply choose to pay a fair fee for reasonable services, rather than suffer the inconvenience of elaborate circumvention methods.
If you're a small business and need the protection and management facilities provided by DRM, you may want to partner with an Application Service Provider that can host and manage your media for you. With this approach, risk and investment is minimal, but cost per transaction can be high. Larger businesses may prefer to retain more control over their infrastructures. In these cases, on-site turnkey systems or mature SDKs may be good starting points for custom systems. These increase startup risks and costs, but reduce transaction costs and long-term risk through ownership and access to the system.
No matter how you choose to integrate DRM technologies into your infrastructure, you should realize that you'll be one of a fairly small circle of early adopters. While newsgroups and the Web are abuzz with debate about the ethics of DRM technologies, as yet there has been little discussion of the programming and design challenges involved. This indicates two things. First, because the field is fairly new, most companies are slow to adopt DRM technologies. Second, few developers have built their own ground-up DRM architectures so far. Instead, most have opted or are opting to deploy bundled commercial applications. If you're still unsure whether DRM will benefit your business model, it may be prudent to wait to see how the technology, and market acceptance of the technology, evolves.
Steven Franklin has been working with Internet and related technologies for over a decade. His interests include distributed software architectures, software engineering process, data management, and information security. You can contact him at [email protected].
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Despite consumer skepticism, interest in DRM technologies is growing steadily. A report issued by the Association of American Publishers in November 2000 recognized over 100 different companies that provide DRM products and services.
Such a diverse market surely offers some great choices for content publishers—but there's only one problem. "DRM adoption is in its infancy," says Mark Mooradian, a senior analyst with Internet research firm Jupiter Media Metrix. "There's basically zero penetration right now."
With so much competition for such a limited market, consolidation is inevitable. Already some of last year's industry leaders, like Xerox spin-off ContentGuard, have left the DRM software business to concentrate on standardization efforts (see "Freedom of Expression"). Others have closed their doors entirely. So who's left standing? Here's a partial list of today's commercial DRM software vendors:
Digital World Services (DWS). A subsidiary of media giant Bertelsmann AG, DWS offers digital distribution products based on its modular Rights Clearing technology. The newest releases are Rights Locker, which acts as a Web-based rights repository, and DWS Content Manager, which provides a single interface for managing downloads to various platforms and devices. DWS also employs a full professional services team for those who need custom-designed solutions (www.dwsco.com).
IBM. Big Blue's Electronic Media Management System (EMMS) is a suite of five products that comprise an end- to-end solution for packaging, hosting, distributing, and managing rights-protected rich media content. The suite supports upgradable security technologies including watermarking, compression, and encryption, as well as a variety of business and content-distribution models (http://www.ibm.com/software/is/emms/).
InterTrust. InterTrust offers the Rights|System platform, a suite of products that includes software for packaging content, servers for supporting DRM infrastructures, clients for regulating content rules, and toolkits for integrating applications. In addition, InterTrust has developed several hardware-based DRM products for embedded devices. It also operates a division called the MetaTrust Utility, which oversees the enforcement of DRM rules and certifies compliance with specifications (www.intertrust.com).
IPR Systems. This Australian e-publishing specialist markets its Digital Book eXchange (DBX), a Java server for e-book and subsidiary rights delivery. With DBX, fees and protection levels can be configured to suit different customer groups, ranging from educational to corporate users. The package permits management of layers of rights for multiple rights holders (www.iprsystems.com).
Liquid Audio. One of the longest-standing DRM vendors, Liquid Audio currently offers its Secure Portable Player Platform (SP3), which supports SDMI-compliant secure audio devices with custom-branded versions of Liquid Player Plus software. Current customers include Aiwa, MPMan, MPuls3, Palm, PocketPyro, Sanyo, Sony, and Toshiba. The company provides SDK licenses for hardware reference designs, firmware, and driver development (www.liquidaudio.com). Microsoft. Redmond's software titan actually offers two different DRM platforms. One, Windows Media Rights Manager 7.1, is an end-to-end solution for secure distribution of digital audio and video. The other is Microsoft Digital Asset Server, part of the company's e-book initiative. Microsoft's development of DRM technologies is ongoing, having introduced key components at the OS level with Windows XP (www.microsoft.com). |
