Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the use of technology and systems employed to restrict the use of copyrighted digital materials, but there’s more to it than just restrictions. Understanding more about rights management not only helps churches to act more responsibly with digital media, but can also help them in protecting their own valuable distributed media from irresponsible use. Churches of all sizes—and the AV consultants and designers that work with them—can profit from knowing the current state of how digital rights are managed. And as it turns out, the more digital content a church distributes, the more it has to gain.
The rights dilemma
To take and use something that is not ours is at best impolite. At its worst, it can be illegal. In an age where digital media is so easy to access, repurpose, and redistribute, people who often know that unauthorized use is wrong can find themselves doing it anyway. Houses of worship are no exception. As both avid consumers of digital content from others, as well as distributors and creators of their own digital content, churches are increasingly finding themselves at a digital media crossroads. This is where the evolving DRM tools can help us act responsibly. They can remind us of who should get paid and when, but they also offer a clear signal that we need to protect material that is ours from irresponsible use.
In an age where digital media is so easy to access, repurpose, and redistribute, people who often know that unauthorized use is wrong can find themselves doing it anyway. Houses of worship are no exception.
Rights management in the digital age is serious business. The explosion of digital content in the entertainment industry has seen to that. In common legal parlance, DRM has "teeth" as the result of the 1990 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that gives authority to DRM’s technological controls. This copyright law criminalizes the creation or use of technology, devices, or services designed to circumvent DRM, but its application is all but straightforward.
DRM has "teeth" as the result of the 1990 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) ...
While it is clear that content creators and owners have financial and artistic reasons for including DRM in their work and products, some consumer rights groups, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have expressed that the limitations imposed by DRM are too severe and argue that DRM can stifle innovation in the marketplace, hide product flaws, and inconvenience consumers. To be sure, these groups believe that protection is needed, but that current DRM technology and related legislation infringe on consumer rights. The trick is to find a balance between the rights of creators and content owners, and consumer expectations.
Managing digital rights
The three most common technologies to mitigate the illicit distribution of content are tokenization, encrypted streaming, and DRM products.
Tokenization prevents most users from unauthorized viewing and sharing of content by creating a URL with a key or token that grants access, but has a short expiration period that prevents the use of that URL by other users once it has expired. It is simple and cheap to implement, employing blocking of availability based on time, GeoBlocking, and IP restrictions.
Encrypted streaming offers more control using Media Source Extensions (MSE), a W3C specification that allows JavaScript to send byte streams to media codecs within web browsers that support HTML5 video and audio with plugin-free web-based streaming, and Encrypted Media Extension (EME), another W3C specification that creates a communication channel between web browsers and a Content Decryption Module (CDM). These content protection technologies can scramble the video with the AES-128 algorithm, making encrypted content unviewable without access to the decryption keys. This is an economical approach because implementing an encryption does not carry any additional costs beyond its initial implementation.
DRM technologies offer more secure key handling and the most control of content, including offline viewing, pre-provisioning licenses, and Selectable Output Control (SOC), which enables content providers to restrict playback to unauthorized devices. Content is encrypted and packaged, then stored before streaming begins. When a user attempts to play back a media content, the media player is required to reach out to a license server requesting a "key." In each case, the server determines whether the user and device are authorized before issuing a unique license response along with a decryption key. The player or decryption module can then use the key to decrypt and play back the content for the user. To accommodate the major distribution platforms, multiple DRM schemes are often employed for greater device compatibility.
DRM products, including SaaS-based DRM services, offer the highest degree of control over the viewability of digital content, but vary in complexity, benefits, and implementation costs. The most common DRM systems in the market today are Google’s Widevine, Microsoft’s PlayReady, Apple’s FairPlay, and Adobe Primetime (formerly Adobe Access). Multi-DRM solution providers, like EZDRM, can simplify multi-DRM workflows to reach the broadest range of end-user devices.
Conclusion
Knowing how digital rights are controlled is important to churches that regularly employ digital content for worship, and is therefore important for AV consultants and designers to understand. But awareness of the many benefits of Digital Rights Management is key to the success of churches who create and distribute digital content.
