With the advent of the Internet, the possibility to easily sell and rapidly distribute high-value digital contents has become a reality. There is a risk in this approach, though. Once downloaded to a client system, digital content can be misappropriated and illegally redistributed. While this problem has affected copyright material for centuries, the exposure with digital content is greater. A photocopy of a paper book is less valuable than the original, whereas a copy of an HTML book is identical to the original. Similarly, a copy of an analog audiotape has lower fidelity than the original, but a copy of a digital audio file maintains the original audio fidelity. Digital copies are perfect copies. With the prevalence of Internet access, it is possible for a single, unscrupulous entity to duplicate and distribute any number of unlicensed copies of an original. In fact, this can be done internationally, including from a server in a country with less restrictive intellectual-property laws.
In the past few years, a number of Digital Rights Management (DRM) products have been designed and created that attempt to address the issue of licensing and controlling distribution of digital content. In general, the consumer of the digital content is required to install a customized client-side DRM-enabled player. Such a player verifies which rights the user has acquired and enforces those rights. For example, if the user has not acquired the right to print particular contents, the player will disable the printing option. This approach is somewhat limited since it requires the installation of customized players on the client system. DRM-enabled customized players are not always desirable or practical. Furthermore, the set of contents that can be displayed by a customized DRM player is certainly limited, since it becomes necessary to provide a different player for every media format (HTML, MPEG, AVI, WAV, etc.), as well as a version of the player for every target client operating environment.
To enforce DRM while also addressing the portability and flexibility issues listed above, we have designed and developed two portable solutions where DRM is enforced at a very low level. In fact, our lightweight and portable solutions to the DRM-enablement problem do not require specialized players:
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