Rights management 275 media licensing royalty management Executive materials tracking gateway revenue accounting project management acquisition action management rights owners contract rights management Digital content Authors Composers Writers Artists Producers intellectual payments property reports Figure 14.6 Contract rights.
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Financial clearing house A facility that receives financial transaction records, resolves the transactions, and makes the required payments to the value chain participants and value chain delegates. Usage clearing house A facility that gathers reports and statistics of how DRM protected media is used by consumers and by other participants in the value chain. It resolves the requirements for usage reporting and provides reports to specified recipients. Third-party revenues The DRM supplier has two possible sources of revenue: a fee for each transaction or a license for a fixed period (typically annual). The clearing houses usually charge per transaction. System integration A large system is going to require many disparate software systems to be integrated. Is middleware required to ease the integration of DRM with back-office systems? These include e-commerce systems, contracts management, digital asset management, and the clearinghouse. Contracts management Most DRM systems produce comprehensive statistics and reports of consumer use. To apportion payments to the relevant parties the DRM operator may well need other software products, specifically a contracts management package. These products are outside the scope of this book. Good examples can be found in System 7 from Jaguar Consulting and iRights from Ness. These products have modules for the following functions: To manage contracts with artists To acquire content from production companies To track the usage of content To distribute royalties to artists The contracts management application often sits at the hub of the business. Gateways link to the DRM, and to the digital asset management system that may be used as the content library or vault. 274 The Technology of Video and Audio Streaming
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Payment and usage information is passed back to the clearinghouse. An electronic purse can store a small cache of credit within the media player. This avoids the need to clear every transaction. DRM systems should have means to silently report tampering back to the data center. Super-distribution Super-distribution commonly is used in viral marketing. This is where customers pass content to friends, perhaps in the belief that it is a shared secret. Content that is passed from user to user has to have persistent protection after copying. Each user must make an individual transaction to gain authorization to use the content. Issues for the user So far I have considered the providers issues. The choice of DRM is also an issue for the consumer. If the system is too complex, there are thousands of other web sites out there, only a click away. Another major issue is payment security. Customers have to trust the supplier with their credit card details. The consequence of this fear is that reputable traders can lose potential business. There are steps being taken to counteract these fears, where trusted third parties act as brokers for online transactions. A good DRM system should be transparent to the end-users. The acquisition of the software executables should be automatic and not require manual intervention from the user. Browsers now include rights management preinstalled. The second is that the financial transactions must be simple and secure. Most DRM systems allocate the license to a node and not the user. Some attributes of the PC are used as part of the key; for example, the file may be locked to an IP address. If you want to move protected media between a desktop PC and a laptop this may require a nodeless DRM. Note that this is not copying; the content is moved to the portable machine and then moved back to the desktop. Clearing houses Subscriptions could be managed by a web site database. All that is required is secure authorization and usage statistics. If the consumer pays for content the clearinghouses will process the micro-payments from consumers and pass payments to the content providers. An electronic purse may hold a small local cache of credit. Rights management 273
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The target devices for streaming are not just PCs; they could be wireless PDAs or portable music players. Content will have to be repurposed for the requirements of each device. Content for the PDA requires careful design to be compelling within the limits of a small display area. Compatibility with media players Which player do you choose? Corporate users can choose a single system. B2B and B2C suppliers may want to offer the user a choice. Two of the popular streaming architectures already include DRM systems (Real and Windows Media). If you want to support several architectures you may end up having to interface with three different DRM systems. Commerce When you are selecting a DRM system, you need to look at the features on offer. Does it support cross-selling? An important factor is the transaction costs for micro-payments. Can you make retrospective changes to the business rules? This allows price changes for downloaded content that already resides on the customer s PC. Is it possible to revoke access to content? Reseller The reseller could be a retail web store or a content portal, aggregating content from several suppliers. The content could be sold through several stages before the final purchase by the end-consumer. A distributor may buy content from many creators and sell to the consumer. Distributors will want to set up the business rules for the trading of content, and may want to add further rules, add their own margin, and then add special offers. So the DRM systems should support modification and additions to the business rules by trusted partners in the value chain. Consumer/user The end-user first gains authorization from the clearing house or data center. Then he or she is free to open and view the encrypted content. Now a consumer may want to preview content before making the decision to buy. This purchase may be outright, or could be for a fixed period rental. Consumers are often encouraged to forward media to friends a process known as viral marketing. The DRM system has to support secure super-distribution for this personal recommendation to operate. 272 The Technology of Video and Audio Streaming
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Rights management 271 commerce server rights server content server business rules key PC DRM client request content transmit authorization request rules transmit rules request media file deliver content rules + authorization = decrypt asset encrypted content A/V audio Figure 14.5 Unwrapping the content.
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tion, suitably modified by the business rules, then initiates the decryption of the content. The DRM client follows this typical sequence: 1. Send a request for the content and, if necessary, undertake a financial transaction. 2. If the client has credit, the commerce server transmits the authorization key. 3. The DRM client requests the business rules from the rights server and the media file from the content server. 4. The rights server forwards the business rules. 5. The content server streams the media. 6. The DRM client allows access to the media according to the business rules. The exact sequence varies from product to product. Note that the business rules can be downloaded each time and are separate from the content. This allows the content owner to change the rules at any time without having to reencrypt the media file. A movie initially might be available on a pay-per-view basis, then at a later date released for outright sale. The publisher may want to add or withdraw special offers. This division between the product and the promotional wrapper gives the retailer of virtual products greater freedom than the vendor of physical merchandise (where the offer could be printed on the packaging). It also allows pricing to be changed in real-time, much like the street vendor or an airline trying to fill empty seats at the last minute. The authorization can be issued in several ways. It could be from a subscriber management system (long used by pay TV) or it could be an e-commerce system. The rights management parties There are several parties in any content transaction. Each is looking for a different set of features in a DRM system. The final choice has to satisfy all parties if the commercial model is to be successful. Content creators/publishers Content can take many forms. The first focus was on music distribution, a consequence of the Napster debacle. The distribution of video content is very much tied to satisfactory security, much like the delayed release of the DVD. Live events are an area where pay-per-view could be applied. 270 The Technology of Video and Audio Streaming
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typically by 30 percent. The alternative is to use a bridge or router at the output port of the streaming server that can perform the encryption. This allows the use of a standard media server. Unwrapping The final user or the consumer wants to view and listen to the content. To decrypt the content, first the user has to obtain authorization. This authoriza- Rights management 269 packaging content rights server content server encrypted content business rules A/V audio Figure 14.4 Wrapping the content. Table 14.1 Pros and Cons of the Pre-Encryption and On-the-Fly Methods Pros Cons Pre-encryption Content is secure on the server Not suited to live streaming No serving overheads Single key per file On-the-fly Can be used for live webcasts Additional server-side processing New key per stream Content can be compromised on the streaming server
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Subscriptions, long popular with print media, are another method of collecting payments. They are more suited to a service rather than pay-per-view. Subscriptions usually are prepaid. An alternative for business-to-business transactions would be to bill in retrospect. Account payments can support a fixed rate service or pay-per-view. For the business selling content to the consumer, the prepaid purse or micropayments are the alternative. With the purse, the customer buys credit from the clearinghouse. This credit is stored securely in the DRM client. The value is decremented as content is viewed. Micro-payments are aggregated by the clearinghouse into larger transactions, perhaps made at monthly intervals. Business rules The business model will dictate a set of business rules. The DRM client uses the rules to gain access to the content. The terms and conditions can change with time so the license issuer must be able to change the rules or revoke a license. This may be necessary for legal or business reasons, or the content may become outdated or inappropriate. A good DRM system should allow the revocation of content even after it has been downloaded. Wrapping This is the process of securing the content and associating with the content the business rules to enable unwrapping by the media player. The processes are not necessarily concurrent. Encrypting may be performed while the media is encoded, and the business rules added later. There are two different points where content files can be encrypted. The first is before media is placed on the content server. The second is to encrypt onthe- fly, as the content is streamed to the media player. The latter is the model that conditional access systems have used for pay-per-view television. Pre-encryption and on-the-fly Pre-encryption systems usually package the clip file as a whole, rather than packet by packet. For live use this is not an option; for webcasts the encryption has to be on-the-fly. To meet this need, a different form of encryption has been developed, where the processing takes place at the point of delivery. This on-the-fly encryption has a second advantage that a new key is generated for each stream. Pre-encryption generates a single key for the file at the time of wrapping. So if the key is compromised, all copies of the file can be opened. On-the-fly encryption can be an additional application running on the streaming server, but this will lower the number of streams a given server can deliver, 268 The Technology of Video and Audio Streaming
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compromised, watermarking enables the tracing of the possible sources of the piracy. Business models The DRM has to be very flexible to accommodate the many different ways a consumer can purchase the content. There are many business models for monetizing online content. Usage There are several ways to sell content. There is rental or outright sale. The rental may have qualifiers applied; it could be for a fixed period or for a certain number of plays. Then there is the video-on-demand model, where a payment is required for each viewing of the clip. Delivery The delivery of content can be as a download or stream. The download might be for music files to be used by a portable player or a PDA. Streaming could be for ephemeral content that is watched only once. A third possibility is to archive the file, while it is streaming, for repeat viewing. If it is possible to download content to portable players, security is potentially compromised. Microsoft has developed an interface that allows content to be downloaded securely from the Windows Media Player to portable audio devices that support the SDMI (Secure Digital Music Initiative) standard. Promotion DRM enables many forms of product promotion. The first is to let the viewer see a preview. This may be the edited highlights or the first few minutes of the clip. The preview may be at a lower resolution than the main clip. Other forms of promotion may be special offers such as pass this on to five friends and get a free play . Payment The traditional method for mail order payment is by credit or charge card. This is not a good method for very small transactions; it may cost only 10 cents to listen to a single music track. So other methods have to be used that have a lower cost overhead for such low-value transactions. Rights management 267
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Illegal copying Loss of data integrity tampering with content Peer-to-peer distribution Perhaps the best example of peer-to-peer distribution was the case of Napster. If there is a secure DRM, then e-commerce can be used for online content. This electronic distribution removes the manufacturing costs of physical media and can simplify distribution. Within the corporate networks it can protect valuable and confidential information. For a distance-learning project it ensures protection of intellectual property. Piracy protection Two methods are used to fight piracy: one is encryption and the other is watermarking. Encryption gives the primary protection. Should the encryption be 266 The Technology of Video and Audio Streaming Encrypted content Clearing house media player wrap authorization rules stream or download request & download license $ audio/video content $ Figure 14.3 Exchanging the license.
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