People often come to me and say, hey Melih why don’t you protect Music and Videos, look at the piracy they suffer from etc. So I thought I should write this blog to explain the issues involved.
Content, whether Audio or Video is not difficult to protect! Honestly, the technology has been around for a long time.
However, what is difficult is to implement a practical solution that will work ubiquitously in the industry! There are divided interests and the dreaded big “Trouble Triangle” that stops it from happening!
Now, the Publishers (the people who make money from selling Content, like Music and Videos) want to, and rightly so, protect their interests against piracy. Of course the triangle is 3 fold. We have a publisher who creates the content, we have a hardware manufacturer who builds the hardware to play this music or video and we have the Users who has the hardware and the content (music/video).
Now, to achieve a secured/controlled distribution to mitigate piracy you need to convince at least 2 of the 3 parties in that triangle! Any 2 and you have a controlled/secured distribution!
Publishers: it is obvious as to why they would want to secure their content.
Hardware Manufacturers: Some might want to do deals with major content providers in return for some market share, but Hardware manufacturers do not want to limit their markets by limiting who can buy their products.
Users: They just want content! Its fair to say that in general they don’t care about security or control of distribution channels (yes yes, i hear some of you saying that they should.. but lets get realistic here.)
while distribution is getting easier (Internet and downloads, compared to records and CDs of 70s and 80s) unless 2 of the 3 parties (has to be ubiquitous and just having one hardware provider won’t do) are interested in pushing security and control, I find it difficult to see how security and control can be established.
However, saying that, this could represent a new opportunity and a new business model for content providers turning this lemon into a lemonade by adopting a new business model by piggy backing on this new distribution era.
Thanks
Melih