Digital Rights Management: Business and Technology

Rating:
Summary: A good attempt at explaining a difficult topic
Review: As noted below, DRM consists of legal, technical and business issues and anyone trying to provide an overview of all three has their work cut out for them. Particularly in the early chapters of the book, these authors give it a good try.

Unfortunately, the biggest problem with the book is that they try to treat the technology standards and products available on the market, and the market is just changing too quickly for that to be for more than just a superficial look. Too much of what they discuss is already outdated, out-of-business, merged with other offerings or otherwise defunct. Not the fault of the authors, just the nature of the DRM market.

This book is:

Not a good read if you already understand the basic issues and hope to get more insight into the technology-- go to the web for that.

Absolutely a good read if you want to become familiar in a basic way in the underlying issues. Part 1 of the book is really useful reading even to help people who are pretty familiar with the topic structure their thinking.

Rating:
Summary: By far the best treatment of DRM I've ever run across
Review: DRM is a confusing topic, and this one of the clearest expositions of DRM (or most any other technical topic!) that I've ever run across. It demystifies a complex subject with simple straightforward language, describes key vendors and organizes them accurately into categories, and even contains a wealth of useful materials such as checklists to help the customer determine business/technical requirements, evaluate vendors, etc.

A must-have for any publisher, intellectual property lawyer, venture capitalist, technology vendor, or consulting firm dealing with digital content distribution or online intellectual property.

Rating:
Summary: By far the best treatment of DRM I've ever run across
Review: DRM is a confusing topic, and this one of the clearest expositions of DRM (or most any other technical topic!) that I've ever run across. It demystifies a complex subject with simple straightforward language, describes key vendors and organizes them accurately into categories, and even contains a wealth of useful materials such as checklists to help the customer determine business/technical requirements, evaluate vendors, etc.

A must-have for any publisher, intellectual property lawyer, venture capitalist, technology vendor, or consulting firm dealing with digital content distribution or online intellectual property.

Rating:
Summary: Great reference
Review: In an ever changing business landscape, I find nothing more comforting than relevant information. As an web application developer I used to always have questions about legality and DRM that nobody could answer. This book has a permananent spot on my shelf!

Rating:
Summary: Still waiting for DRM to be explained.
Review: The problem with the several texts available on digital copyright or Digital Rights Management is that the topic demands a treatment from at least three different perspectives: namely legal, technical and business. There are several books that try to tackle the topic of digital copyright from a legal viewpoint, and this one is clearly coming from a technical perspective. Legal issues are covered, but rather superficially. More surprisingly the crucial business issues and models that are driving interest in DRM are barely mentioned and there is no dicussion of the business models that are working and those that are not. Disappointingly many of the technical issues are also fudged in a way that will leave non-technical audiences confused, and those who are following technical developments frustrated. The fact is that, technically at least, DRM is an area where approaches, technologies and standards are all in rapid development and the industry has failed to converge on any single direction. This book's effort to offer a comprehensive review of available products means that it risked redundancy before it was published, as many of the companies and technologies have ceased to be relevant. What the world still needs is a book on DRM that reviews the law, discusses the business models (and consumer needs) that are driving developments, and describes fundamental approaches in a way that will remain relevant whatever product Microsoft may impose on us all next year. Unfortunately this book intrigues enough to encourage one to want to know more about DRM, but never really provides the answers.

Rating:
Summary: Very good market overview
Review: This book combines a business strategist's view of the DRM space with a sound explanation of the underlying technology, and also explains how both have evolved over the past decade. It's rare to find both views in any book, particularly one about an emerging software market. Usually, insights into markets like this book provides require purchasing research reports and speaking one-on-one to industry insiders. So, save yourself $10,000 and three weeks of work ... buy the book.

Rating:
Summary: This is a book that a whole industry has been waiting to see
Review: This is a book that a whole industry has been waiting to see and Rosenblatt, Trippe and Mooney have prepared a seemingly comprehensive cover of this strategically important and currently under-regarded field. Covering everything from Origins to Opportunities, standards, business models and technology a book of this type should provide a one stop reference to anyone whose business pivots on the dissemination of intellectual property over networks, be it text, music, video or software.

However closer reading leaves the uneasy feeling that one has when one finds that parts of the material that one is familiar with are inaccurate or incompletely research, casting doubts on the chapters which one is not equipped to judge.

The authors tread on thin ice in their discussion of encryption and through poor understanding to the relative strengths of cryptographic systems present cryptographic systems as a rather more level playing field than is actually the case. In particular they seriously underestimate the algorithmic strength of the longer key-length versions of the US Advanced Encryption Standard and overplay the chances that open systems of this sort - ones that have been studied publicly for several years by the world leading cryptographers - will have secret trapdoors known only to governments and overlooked by cryptographers. Even their peculiar interpretation of the US Advanced Encryption Standard's original name, Rijndael, suggest that they have nor studied the literature first hand. On the other hand Kerckhoff's axiom seems to be unknown to them and they do not focus on the serious technical problems of protecting digital content once the keys have been made available to unlock the content.

Watermarks within encrypted files have been in use since 1999 in systems such as Perimele's bespoke systems and DITSS information security products. Rendering and decryption applications which do not need a stand alone application or plug-in are indeed a holy grail for the reasons that the authors have outlined and as the authors indicate do change the very nature to the business case - but far from being impossible at present these have been in widespread use since 1997 in a range of products in the Pay2See family of solutions.

There is still excellent material on Technology standards although the authors do not seem to be aware of the demise of XMCL and rise of MPEG-21. All in all a good read and well worth skimming if you are in the business but certainly not enough reliable information to make informed decision from and by no means the definitive guide that it purports to be...