(by Ed Keating, Partner, Easton Consultants): William Krepick, President & CEO of Macrovision, was the featured speaker at the SIIA’s Executive Roundtable Series on Friday March 12th. He spoke on the topic of Digital Rights Management and Implementations. He suggested that four themes need to be considered for DRM to be successful:
– Content Owners Need to Change Business Models: Krepick discussed the challenges some content owners face in coming up with business models that attract customers, yet protects content. He provided the example of how TurboTax removed Macrovision’s DRM solution from the 2004 version because of customer outcry about the limited printing and software sharing restrictions.
– Patent Overhang: Technology companies need to eliminate the “patent overhang” and come up with good solutions that are reasonably priced.
Macrovision has a technologically effective DRM music solution, but the record labels are reluctant to put so powerful a tool on there content. They fear it could drive more users over to the file sharing networks. Even though the user experience is terrific, it only works with the Windows Media Player format, can only be used on Windows machines. It will not allow for the creation of MP3 files.
– Courts and DMCA: The Courts need to support the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for DRM to work. He thought recent decisions were being made in favor of the content owners but he envisions some upcoming challenges with the proliferation of set top boxes that copy video content. He pondered what would happen when these boxes copy a movie that you only rented from a video on demand service? He thought it unlikely that the movie studies would let you pay $3 for the rental and be able to keep it forever.
– Cooperation between Content Owners and Hardware Producers: For DRM to work in the long term, the industries need to work together as they did with DVDs. As a result of the cooperation between the movie studios and manufacturers, all DVD players and DVD disks have a DRM system built right in.
The biggest challenge here is software called DVD X Copy that can copy a DVD, along with the Macrovision DRM system. The company, 321 Studios, in St Louis is being sued by many players in the industry for violating a host of intellectual property laws.
Krepick concluded by sharing some information about a new product that Macrovision will be releasing in 2-3 months. It has three components:
– Tracks and provides market intelligence on downloaded content. Helps content owners track market demand and losses.
– Interdiction: can be configured to remove all content from all file sharing sites or have the download take 24 hours.
– Redirect: the file can be replaced with a message and a redirect to the content owner’s site. Here the content can be purchased.
Comments have been disabled for this post