In response to Steve Job’s “Thoughts on Music” piece, Bill McCoy of Adobe has responded with regards to ebooks. While Adobe supports DRM:

Yet, I would like nothing more than to have DRM technology just fade away. After all the main challenge we have in digital publishing is to get it adopted by mainstream consumers. And the main challenge 98% of book authors and publishers have is to get people to be aware of their books, not to prevent piracy. So my challenge to print publishers and authors: why not support "social DRM", rather than heavyweight DRM? If that's a direction you are willing to go, Adobe will back you up, 1000%.

The social DRM he refers to is the practice by some of marking each copy for the purchaser:

For eBooks, I really like the "social DRM" approach of The Pragmatic Programmers, who "stamp" PDF eBooks with a "For the Exclusive Use of ..." and the name of the purchaser.

37signals also does this with their PDF of Getting Real. The copy I purchased has my name on the bottom of each page. While likely not that hard to edit off it is a mild deterrent to some to make quick copies (email to people, etc). After all, your not going to stop the determined regardless of the copy protection you use.

I came across another company that appears to be taking this to the next level for video. The service is called Streamburst and it allows people to sell their videos online in multiple formats and DRM free. They offer Mpeg-4 versions at both high quality and portable (ipod, zune, etc) and also mobile phone versions. What’s nice is that you get them all with your purchase and you appear to be able to download them as many times as you need. Here are the formats:

  • 720 x 400 pixels - 25fps - MPEG4 ISMA Container - MPEG4 AVC (H264) Video Codec - AAC Audio Codec
  • 320 x 176 pixels - 25fps - MPEG4 ISMA Container - MPEG4 AVC (H264) Video Codec - AAC Audio Codec
  • 208 x 112 pixels - 15fps - MPEG4 3GPP Container - MPEG4 (Xvid) Video Codec - AAC Audio Codec - Mono

And of course, since it doesn’t use traditional DRM you can play it on any platform that supports Mpeg4. I played the file I downloaded on Windows, OSX and Linux without a problem. I went ahead and bought In Search of the Valley for $8. You have the choice of using Google Checkout or Paypal at this point. Once you’ve purchased it you have access to the download which then builds a custom version of the file for you. Here’s what the building screen looks like:

streamburst download

And here’s the opening screen of the movie file with my name on it:

streamburst video

They also apparently strip out a unique series of bits from each copy of a file downloaded so as to watermark it, but it should be undetectable. Again this won’t deter the determined but is for the “casual copying”.

I think it will be interesting to see if models such as this prevail (presuming some sort of protection remains) and how or if they will handle the lending arena in libraries. Many currently depend on things blowing up after a set amount of time, but some libraries already lend things out on players and this could go a similar route.