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Look, Don't Touch
"The Joy Of Color" exhibition pulled in hundreds of thousands of visitors to Jerusalem's Israel Museum
earlier this year. On display was a dazzling array of paintings, including works by Kandinsky,
Kokoschka, and Klee, from the collection of Werner and Gabrielle Merzbacher.
The paintings, you'd think, would have made a great draw for the museum's Internet website as well. But
virtual visitors got to see only five works from the exhibit -- and it took the museum months to get
permission from the Merzbachers, from Zurich, to post those. The couple knew that on the Web there are
no guards, no alarm systems, to stop theft: Any surfer could steal electronic reproductions with a couple
of mouse clicks, save the art on his own computer, print it, e-mail it on to friends -- or sell pirate
reproductions.
The museum faced a common problem: Every day, millions of graphics are taken from websites
worldwide. The companies and institutions with the richest visual wares -- Hollywood studios,
museums, magazines -- risk the theft of their copyrighted materials.
That problem could be history. A two-year-old Israeli startup, cSafe, says it has developed look-but-don't
touch technology for Internet content providers -- allowing them to display graphics or text that cannot be
downloaded. The software would also enable safe sales of Web material: Only paying customers could
copy it, and, unless the seller gave permission, they'd be unable to pass the material on, or print it.
CSafe's new technology could potentially reshape how the Web is used -- much as encryption technology
changed Internet use by enabling safe transmission of credit card numbers, making e-commerce possible.
The key is cSafe's Clever Content technology, which gives content providers remote control over what
they put on the Internet. A user can prevent the removal of graphics -- or allow them to be bought or
printed. The owner of a photo can sell it over the Net, but restrict the number of times the buyer can print
it, or block the buyer from e-mailing it to someone else.
The first application based on that technology, PixSafe, due out this summer, will guard graphics. Surfers
attempting to save a protected picture will find the "save as..." function in their browsers disabled when
they try to save the graphic, and a pop-up window will warn that the image is protected by PixSafe.
Those who try to save the graphic with a screen-capture function -- software which saves any part of, or
the whole screen, by simply replicating it pixel by pixel instead of copying the whole file -- will find that
in the reproduction, the graphic is replaced by a big "X."
Just down the road are products to protect text and enable sales of the protected content. The market is as
big as the Web.
Csafe's story starts in 1997, with the frustrations of Daniel Schreiber, a British-born attorney, who dealt
with high-tech mergers and acquisitions at a large Tel Aviv law firm. Schreiber, who was also working
on his masters in copyright law, was tired of being on the edge of high-tech instead of at its center. "I told
Andrew Goldman, a software engineer," he recalls, "that I wanted to start a company. He said 'Come up
with an idea and I'll design it.'"
The idea -- a copyright problem, naturally -- came to Schreiber on the way home from Tel Aviv to Beit
Shemesh, outside Jerusalem. "It hit me that once data has left a server, there's no control over it. Anyone
can then 'own the bytes.'" Research disclosed that technologies existed that mark content so that
plagiarists can be caught. But no one offered a way to keep Internet content from being stolen in the first
place.
Schreiber had spotted a problem that drives major content providers around the bend. Warner Brothers
Online President Jim Moloshock recently gave an example: Geocities, a Yahoo subsidiary, provides free
and low-cost websites to 3 million users -- and a check of Geocities sites turned up over 400,000 pages
featuring bootlegged Warner graphics.
Goldman, also British-born, left his job at News Datacom Systems in Jerusalem and got to work. The
two put in $200,000 in their own savings and investments from relatives. Last December, they got
another $1.5 million from Israel Seed Partners, a venture capital fund. Steven Miller left a job as vice
president of worldwide marketing at the major U.S. software developer, Oracle, to become cSafe's CEO.
He runs the firm's San Francisco office, which will handle marketing and customer service. Schreiber is
executive VP and board chairman, Goldman, chief technology officer.
Miller, on a short trip to cSafe HQ in Beit Shemesh in early May, says that during his time at Oracle he
had several offers from startups, but cSafe's product was the only one that attracted him. "CSafe's
solution was like aspirin. Other products I was offered were like vitamins," he says. "You've got to have
aspirin in the house, but vitamins are optional."
Schreiber opens his laptop to demonstrate. PixSafe software is installed on the web server, and a simple
interface enables site builders to select which elements to protect. Users can then see an image, but not
save, copy, print or e-mail it.
Currently, there are 20 employees at the firm's Beit Shemesh development center, and two in San
Francisco. But the company is busy taking on new staff in Israel, and Miller says that within a year he'll
have another eight staffers in California.
If cSafe does set the standard for safeguarding Web content, sites that have been wary of posting their
copyright material will start to flourish. Web users may be able to see whole museums that have been kept
off the Internet. But they won't be able to steal the art.
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