Digital rights management (DRM) schemes allow sellers of media files to associate those files with a licence, which sets out what the buyer can and can’t do with their purchases. In principle, DRM schemes have several advantages over simply dictating to users that they shall not make copies:
Nonetheless, DRM technology enforced restrictions that buyers found arbitrary and inconvenient. Competing DRM technologies also meant that files bought from a service supporting one technology might not play on devices that supported another technology.
Later DRM schemes attempted to improve flexibility and interoperability using ideas such as the “authorised domain”, but DRM had probably already worn out its welcome by the time these improvements became available.
A rights locker is an online database in which a buyer can store a record of his or her right to use a media file.
The idea has been around since at least the late 1990s, but obviously online lockers could only become convenient once internet access was also convenient.
Over the past few years, the movie industry has been rolling out a rights locker scheme under the name Ultraviolet. Ultraviolet claims to have around 17 million users and counts around 80 movie studios and technology companies as members (but not Disney, which went with its own locker called Disney Movies Anywhere).
All of the systems described above seem doomed to chronic unpopularity. After all, what music listener or film viewer is going to say “I need a system telling me what I can and cannot do”?
Enter the intermediaries. For governments and copyright owners, it’s a lot easier to police copyright at the level of ISPs and content-sharing sites since (a) there are fewer of them and (b) they’re much bigger targets.
The most obvious way in which intermediaries could help out copyright owners is to install content-filtering technology. YouTube uses a system called Content ID through which copyright owners can ask Google to check uploaded videos against a database of copyrighted works.
Some argue that content-filtering technology might ultimately be the least expensive way of enforcing copyright law. Installing content filters might incur a cost, but this cost is less than the cost of installing rights-management technology everywhere else, or of pursuing large numbers of individual infringers through the existing court system. (But I’m not aware of any empirical studies of these costs.)
Whatever the costs of filtering, critics object to the idea that intermediaries be made into copyright police. Copyright owners might respond: we tried policing individual users, and look how popular that was.
This article originally appeared on The Conversation.
