Piracy and Digital Rights Management of Dvds and the Internet

With widespread use of the Internet and improvements in streaming media and compression technology, digital music, images, DVDs, books and games can be distributed instantaneously across the Internet to end-users. Many digital service providers sell their digital content not only through DVDs but also over computer networks. However, without protection and management of digital rights, digital content can be easily copied, changed, and distributed to a large number of recipients, which could cause revenue loss to media companies. To protect commercial digital intellectual property and avoid digital piracy, we need a system that prevents unauthorized access to digital content and manages content usage rights. (Liu and Safavi-Naini and Sheppard 2003) Estimating revenue losses due to illegal downloads is challenging because it is difficult to determine what fraction of illegal downloads result in lost revenue for the industry and whether illegal downloads, through the "free publicity" they generate, have any positive impacts on box office revenues. However, it is likely that redistribution of unauthorized copies through the Internet will increasingly affect DVD movie sales and paid Internet distribution of movies. As the ease of downloading unauthorized copies of movies grows with the availability of low-cost, high-bandwidth Internet connections and peer-to-peer file sharing networks, the movie industry's concerns about illegal downloads is intensifying. These concerns are heightened by unauthorized copies of movies becoming available on the Internet prior to their U.S. theater release (Seiler and Snider 2003)

Piracy is the unauthorized use or reproduction of music, movies, books, and other types of content that are granted protection under copyright law. This kind of protection typically gives the owner of the content the exclusive right to perform certain actions on the content or to authorize others to do so. We recognize that determining whether an action is authorized or unauthorized may require protracted and subtle debate and that reasonable people may differ in their assessment of a given situation. There are many kinds of content that do not qualify for copyright protection because they do not contain any original authorship and are common public property. Even content that does qualify receives protection only for a limited time, after which that work becomes public property. We refer to these types of content, which are not granted copyright protection, as public content.(Biddle, England, Peinado, and Willman 2004)

There are generally two ways in which piracy can occur: Unauthorized acquisition is the form of piracy with which most people are familiar occurs when a consumer obtains copyrighted content illegitimately, for example by unauthorized downloading of content from a peer-to-peer file sharing service such as Napster, Ares, LimeWire, ITones and Morpheus, or by obtaining illegitimate CDs or DVDs from a street vendor or friend too. Unauthorized use is the form of piracy occur when a consumer obtains a piece of copyrighted content legitimately and then attempts to use it in an unauthorized way.

The term "digital rights management" (DRM) could be defines as simply as using digital technology to exploit and manage the rights inherent in a work. The reality of the term, though, encompasses not just technology, nut a new approach to the whole notion of what we traditionally think of as rights, including issues of copyright, security, sales and distribution, and the impact of these new ideas and technologies on both publishers and their customers. (Hilts 2003) The goal of a DRM system is to enforce licenses between a content provider (the licensor) and a consumer (the licensee) that define rules about authorized use of managed content. There are only a limited number of technologies that can be employed to build DRM systems to achieve this goal.

The concept of digital rights management is central to electronic publishing for commerce. Without a way to protect both rights of the author by keeping the text safe from piracy and unauthorized modification, and those of the publisher by ensuring the ability to collect profits from readers, no one would publish on the Internet. Piracy was a problem back in the day but relatively easy to spot, and the law provided immediately means to deal with it. However, with the introduction of digital publishing process that often supplemented or even eliminate the print only products in favor of electronic files, and the made it easy to create perfect copies of those files, new avenues of exploiting content and the rights inherent in the content emerged, along with new concerns about security of the content and the rights.

Different DRM vendors have different DRM implementations, names and ways to specify the content usage rules. However, the basic DRM process is the same, which usually involves four parties: the content provider, the distributor, the clearinghouse and the consumer. Usually a DRM system is integrated with an e-commerce system that handles financial payments and triggers the function of the clearinghouse. DRM is being displayed in the most common components of a DRM system based on most existing commercial systems. Following the explanation of these common elements, a typical model used by current DRM implementations is presented. (Liu and Safavi-Naini and Sheppard 2003)

The content provider such as a music record label or a movie studio holds the digital rights of the content and wants to protect these rights. The distributor provides distribution channels, such as an online shop or a web retailer. The distributor receives the digital content from the content provider and creates a web catalogue presenting the content and rights metadata for the content promotion. The consumer uses the system to consume the digital content by retrieving downloadable or streaming content through the distribution channel and then paying for the digital license. The player/viewer application used by the consumer takes charge of initiating license request to the clearinghouse and enforcing the content usage rights. The clearinghouse handles the financial transaction for issuing