Protecting intellectual property on the Web
By Stephanie Sanborn

From Infoworld.com

June 25, 2000
THE HULLABALOO OVER digital rights and content rights recently reached a fever pitch as music fans and the recording industry clashed over the distribution of digital music files. However, the DRM (digital rights management) struggle is not limited to music; all companies need to protect what's theirs on the Internet. "The word 'copyright' pretty much says it: If you create it, you have the right to say who gets to copy it or who gets to use it for what purpose," says Tony Henning, senior analyst of virtual asset management at San Mateo, Calif.-based digital photography specialists Future Image. "If stuff you create can be misappropriated, your incentive for continuing to create valuable intellectual property diminishes significantly."

With more companies taking their business online, protecting often-expensive digital content -- such as a graphical catalog created by an auto parts dealer -- becomes much more important. If another company "borrows" images for its own use, the raided company has lost its distinguishing aspect. "Every piece of intellectual property that gets disseminated ... ought to be rights-controlled," Henning explained. "That doesn't mean anything particularly draconian; it just means managing content by knowing who owns it, where it is, and who's using it." Because DRM applies to multiple forms of digital and analog content, several technologies are being used to protect intellectual property. For example, the digital video market often uses watermarked DVDs to prevent copying, whereas basic encryption may be enough to protect PDF or text files.

Regardless of the technology used, access rights associated with the content are necessary to make sure users can reach the resources they need. These rights allow a content owner to dictate who can see the content and in what form; for example, a user may be able to download an e-book, but the rights can be set to prevent forwarding or printing, or make the content expire after a time. ContentGuard, a DRM company spun off from Xerox, currently specializes in the publishing arena. In April ContentGuard focused on rights with the creation of an XrML (Extensible rights Markup Language) standard. "XrML ... specifies rights around the content," says Ranjit Singh, president and COO of ContentGuard, in McLean, Va. "All valuable content will eventually have rights associated with it, because there's concern that the whole notion of the Internet is seamless, frictionless distribution, but it also has the effect of perfect reproduction instantaneously."

XrML is licensed royalty-free by ContentGuard; the company is also setting up an XrML industry forum and working group to develop extensions and upgrades. ContentGuard also will expand into markets other than publishing such as digital audio and video during the next few months, Singh says. In the digital images market, many companies are looking for ways to make sure their images don't wander off their Web sites. According to Fred Bullock, senior vice president of marketing at DRM specialist Alchemedia, businesses that could benefit from DRM for images include stock-photo companies, companies with well-known images, such as Disney, and museums and similar groups that display images on the Web.

"The challenge, especially for people who have visually oriented content, is that anything you can see with a browser is a mouse-click away from being copied," Bullock says. Alchemedia's CleverContent Server 2.0, unveiled last week, allows content owners to embed hyperlinks into images; these links direct viewers back to the company's Web site or provide copyright information. With CleverContent, images cannot be taken from a Web site without the content owner's permission. Because digital images and video -- known as "dollar images," as they promote and drive sales to a site -- are being used more often in the e-commerce realm, the need to protect that property and the investment behind it becomes more pressing. "We're no longer dealing with operating systems and computing environments where information roams in an unprotected fashion," says Talal Shamoon, vice president of media at Santa Clara, Calif.-based InterTrust.

"We're talking about an environment where there are secrets." InterTrust's commerce platform associates access rules with content and ensures the rules follow the content. These rules can also be extended offline so a user can, for example, buy digital music without having to be connected to the backbone, Shamoon says. "In the future, DRM will be part of every digital environment," Shamoon added. "It will be part of the OS, part of the portable device, part of the server -- it will be part of the computer."

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