Category DRM
The Internet Archive’s Copyright Emergency
Sometime last year, I was chatting about digital first sale and e-lending with a highly respected copyright lawyer, someone who is deeply knowledgeable about those issues. We were talking about the library community’s longstanding attempts to get a lending right for digital files in law. We noted that those folks have apparently given up on […]
R.I.P. UV
Last week the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) announced that it is winding down the UltraViolet system for interoperability of digital video. The service will shut down at the end of July. This step – widely seen as inevitable for the last couple of years – is a milestone in the gradual demise of consumer […]
The Fifth Era of Recorded Music
The RIAA released its aggregated annual recorded music revenue numbers for the United States last month. They show that the industry has completed its transition to streaming — and more particularly, to interactive or on-demand streaming. Last year interactive streaming — a la Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play, Napster, Deezer, Tidal, etc. — turned in […]
W3C Approves Encrypted Media Extensions as Web Standard
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced on Monday that it has approved Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) as a Recommendation, meaning that it’s now an official standard. This announcement marks the end of a very contentious debate about the role, if any, that DRM should have in web browser environments and open web standards. EME […]
Copyright Office Releases Results of Section 1201 Study
Late last month, the United States Copyright Office published the results of a study on Section 1201 (17 U.S.C. § 1201), the section of U.S. copyright law that makes it a violation to hack DRM systems and other content access and copy controls. Section 1201 was enacted in 1998 as part of the Digital Millennium […]
Readium LCP Set to Launch
The 2017 EPUB Summit in Brussels this past week was the venue for the beta launch and first live demos of the Readium LCP DRM technology for EPUB-formatted e-books. I’ve discussed aspects of the genesis and design of Readium LCP elsewhere: here is a summary that I presented at last year’s EPUB Summit in Bordeaux. […]
Of Hammers, Nails, and Blockchains
The phrase “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” originated with Abraham Kaplan in his seminal 1964 work on behavioral science. He applied it — as many parents have done ever since — to young kids. These days, blockchain technology is a hammer. An excellent illustration of how this applies […]
2017 Conference: Panel Change; Earlybird Deadline Approaches
I’m announcing a couple of changes in the Copyright and Technology conference on January 24. When we were setting the agenda for the next conference, the FCC was deep in to deliberations over its “Unlock the Box” proposal to require pay-TV operators to stop requiring consumers to pay for renting their set-top boxes and make their […]
E-Book Retail Platform Offers Choice of Watermarking or DRM
EditionGuard is a “white label” e-book retail platform that, like many of its type, is based on Adobe technology, including Adobe Content Server DRM. This week the company added an option called EditionGuard Social DRM, which enables its customers — publishers, retailers, and independent authors — to use e-book watermarking instead of DRM. EditionGuard Social DRM […]
Survey on E-Book DRM Licensing
If you have been following this blog for a while, you’ll know that I have been involved in the design and launch of a new open-source DRM scheme for e-books called Readium LCP (Licensed Content Protection). The formal launch of Readium LCP is expected to take place by the end of this year. As I’ve explained, […]
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