Category Technologies
Are NFTs DRM by Another Name?
Twenty years ago, when the first generation of DRM technologies hit the market, one of the benefits they touted was that with DRM-packaged files, consumers could be sure that they were getting the genuine content from the source. For example, if the content was a scientific journal article with research results, they could be confident […]
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 […]
Blockchain Comes to E-Books, DRM Included
Blockchain technology has reached e-books. The CEOs of two startups with e-book distribution platforms based on blockchains, Scenarex and Publica, are going to appear with me on a panel at the Digital Book World conference in Nashville in early October. The similarities of their technologies indicate a direction for blockchains in the e-book world. The […]
New White Paper on E-book Watermarking
There’s been lots and lots of talk about DRM for e-books over the years. Lots of controversy, debates, diatribes, conference panels, etc. Watermarking? Not so much. That’s despite the fact that e-book watermarking has been in use for much longer than most people realize, and that it has recently become very popular in certain geographies, […]
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 […]
The Next Level in E-Book Watermarking
Last week’s announcement of a partnership between Digimarc and Erudition Digital represents an interesting next step in the evolution of watermarking as a copyright protection technology, in this case for e-books. Erudition Digital is an e-book distributor based in the UK that has incorporated watermarking technology from Custos Technologies of South Africa. According to last […]
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. […]
The Failure of Print and E-Book Bundling
How many times has this happened to you: you buy a print book, you start to read it, you go on a trip, you forget to take the book, you find the e-book version online, and you chafe at having to pay full price for another version of something you already have? The music industry […]
Sacem’s Partnership with IBM
IBM announced a deal with the French music rights collecting society Sacem last week to co-develop a new system called URights. The system is expected to launch by the end of this year, and the partnership will span ten years. The system will run on IBM’s cloud computing infrastructure and use IBM’s implementation of the […]
2017 Conference
I’m pleased to welcome the law firm of Davis Wright & Tremaine (DWT) as a Gold Sponsor for the Copyright and Technology 2017 conference. DWT partner Lance Koonce is one of the leaders of the firm’s Blockchain Initiative and has been especially active in blockchain applications for media and the arts. (In fact, I first met […]
Copyright and Technology 
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