Web Extra: DRM: Turning Pirates into Distributors - ' DRM beyond Entertainment '

DRM beyond Entertainment

Is that a direction that DRM may take in the future?

It will get into price per transaction, just like you have in the credit-card business, and maybe there's a minimum charge per transaction. I don't think DRM will be able to ask for what the credit card companies ask for—something like two and a half percent of the value of the goods that you purchased.

When you're dealing with electronic, I don't think people will be willing to pay that much of a percentage. But they may be willing to pay a small transaction fee independent of the volume. If I'm buying an electronic good worth $20,000, for example, I don't want to be paying one percent of that. So I think this whole issue of metering and fair and equitable payment schemes is something that will have to be worked out in the future.

Further, there have been a lot of people trying to do end-to-end systems and, quite frankly, they've not been able to link up all the systems from billing to the selling of content. And that has been a factor that has delayed the deployment of DRM. But it still carries a hell of a lot of promise.

Originally, DRM was seen as something that only entertainment companies were using; now it's being more widely adopted across industries, by financial firms and also by healthcare firms. How can non-entertainment companies use DRM?

What DRM allows you to do is specify that content can only be used for specific reasons. Turn that around to a financial institution, for example, so that instead of selling its research material, it is actually in the business of acquiring customers. And if you take a financial institution, they will spend anywhere from $500 to $2,000 to acquire a financial customer. Now, imagine what you can do if you can now send these reports to people and actually encourage distribution, whet their appetites for it. It's a new marketing play.

You can say to someone, "If you want to open this, just give me your name and telephone number, and you can view it for free." So it becomes a marketing tool where you can now reach markets of many targeted at once. That's the beauty of this technology. Combined with the Internet, you can really reach and advertise to individuals with markets of millions.

And it's true in medical records, with such things as compliance with new federal data privacy regulations that govern personal medical records. As they're kept electronically, there is a need for controlling access.

Say I'm sending my doctor an electronic copy of my medical records—but using digital content controls, I can tell the doctor that he or she can only view them on a particular Tuesday afternoon between 4:30 p.m. and 5 p.m., the time I'm going to be visiting that doctor. This way, I'm not giving my doctor the ability to look at my records at any time and send them all over the place. I can get very specific about usage rights.

Usually, you don't want your records put on the Net or distributed to your new insurance company, say. DRM is all about protecting somebody's rights to the information.

You know, people really confuse the issue when they talk about who has the rights to content. The way I define digital rights management is that it's the ability of the owner of the content to distribute content electronically and with the knowledge that it will be used according to his or her wishes.

What can those wishes be? Getting notification when someone reads, say, a magazine article online. Or you could say you can read this electronically, but I don't want you making a printed copy. In either event, you are defining how content that belongs to you or your company gets used.

It's all about the distribution of content, electronically over the Internet, and having the ability to define how people use it, for what purpose and for how long—and under what conditions.