Hitchhiker's Guide to Streaming Media: DRM

Yes, anything you see or hear can be pirated—just buy a license and you can point a camera at a screen and create a copy—no problem. This anarchic argument prevailed while the music industry was trying to adapt to the internet, and because audio is simply smaller than video to move around the internet, the RECORDING part of the music industry was hit very hard very quickly.

The film and video industry was lucky in that it took several years longer before the internet became an effective distribution medium for large form content such as theirs. This gave them time to review and adopt stronger DRM before they introduced back catalogue to the internet.

DRM Technologies In Use Today
Largely studios these days use Windows Media DRM 10. This is a mature DRM and despite occasional hacks, it is pretty robust. The content is encrypted and can only be decrypted by media players that successfully obtain a license from the related Windows Media Rights Manager 10 license server.

While Apple introduced a so-called “DRM” in their iTunes model, in actuality this is in all reality just a lock in to their application and portal this is actually a conditional access model.

RealNetworks also introduced a “DRM” that worked on session-by-session basis and awarded end users “tokens” for the session which allow certain rights, such as a single download. However the content itself was NOT protected. Once you had it saved it was easy to copy and share.

Finally, of the big guns, Adobe has announced a DRM for Flash, which on the surface looks like it is a clone of the Windows DRM system. At the point of writing this entry for the Hitchhikers Guide no working demos have been made seen by the author.

It is worth mentioning that there are a sprinkling of other would-be DRM technologies. Widevine has an interesting add on that can be configured to detect if a user is “screen scraping” a copy of a video and effectively prevents the user doing so. This really seems to be fitting the stereotype of DRM as a copy protection tool, and misses the important functionality that DRM may often be configured to encourage copying, but allow the rights owner to audit each use.

The most analogous real-world technology to DRM is the Senlock security tagging system seen used to prevent CD and DVD shoplifting. These systems make it difficult to enter a music store, find what you want, and simply walk out without paying. They enforce a point-of-sale revenue.

However once you are home you can copy the content to your heart’s content and there is nothing anyone can do about that.

In the same way DRM allows content rights wwners and distributors to enforce their rights at the point of sale. Once that is done they have achieved their revenue, and the user may still, as in the real world, then “crack” the DRM and copy the content for illegal redistribution. The DRM may make this difficult, but it will rarely make it impossible.

This makes it important that the legitimate distribution point is easier to use than the pirates’. If this is the case then there is a revenue model to be had, since it is easier for me to visit my local DVD shop than sit in a bar waiting for the chap with a bag of pirate DVDs to pass by with the DVD I want…