TABLE OF CONTENTS Companies whose business is content generally want to protect it against piracy and abuse. Piracy is not a new problem. It has been around for as long as there have been printed books, radio, and tape recorders. Piracy is a complex phenomenon, as it seems to harm and nourish the content industry at the same time.
The video recorder, and all the piracy that came with it, has not killed the movie business. Quite the contrary, it created a new market that is now bigger than that of movie theaters. A well-known software company is known to live by the philosophy that "If you are going to pirate any software, make sure it is ours."
But the Internet has lifted piracy to an unprecedented global scale, and has made illegal content sharing almost frictionless. The content industry is trying to answer with digital rights management (DRM) technology.
There are many ways to protect content and manage digital rights, depending on the type of content, the level of protection it requires, and the way it is delivered. Some of the methods used are:
Watermarking: This technique consists of adding some invisible information to the content that allows it to be recognized and tracked. The watermark is transparent to the rendering software, but can be detected with special tracking tools. Watermarking can be quite complex, as the watermark must be protected against manipulation. [6]
Copy protection: Techniques to protect software to be copied have...
