Choosing a DRM Strategy
Unlike pay TV, however, most consumers think of their music as their own, and desire access to it at any time, even if they’ve not listened to a song for the last five years. To accommodate this, uh, urge, MTV’s music store also allows consumers to buy content and burn it to a CD.
A FAQ on urge.com details the difference between the subscribing and owning:
Music you download as an URGE All Access subscriber may be played on your PC (or transferred to up to two PlaysForSure portable music players if you have an URGE All Access To Go subscription) for as long as you maintain your subscription account. This music cannot be burned to a CD. Music you purchase from URGE is yours to play forever and is burnable to a CD as well as transferable to a compatible portable music player.
MTV is offering, in essence, the iTunes model of owning content, but if a customers are already paying the $9.95 or $14.95 subscription fee, they still need to pay 99 cents per track to own a song beyond the length of their subscription.
Apple, meanwhile, continues its simple model unchanged. What remains to be seen, however, is whether Apple will license use of its own DRM—FairPlay—if and when another subscription or pay-per-track model finally begins to encroach on Apple’s current dominance of the audio and video download market.
Watermarking
The third strategic model in DRM works best with mass-distributed physical content but is also making inroads into on-demand web content. This model, watermarking, assumes at some level that content will be pirated or shared illegally, so it provides a way to trace content back to the original distribution.
The most famous example of watermarking to date is the Oscar screening discs that are distributed to members of the Motion Picture Academy of America for viewing prior to voting for the Academy Awards. The biggest benefit of watermarking, proponents says, is the deterrent factor: high-profile adoptions of watermarking serve to let both the consumer and potential pirates know that illicit movements can now be traced. In 2004, an actor who’d copied a watermarked screener was fined $150,000 for each of the two movies—The Last Samurai and Mystic River—that he copied and gave to someone that he claimed he didn’t realize planned to pirate them and sell the copies.
Will watermarking hit the mainstream? Time will tell. But it’s already attracting attention for direct-to-DVD movies and online content. USA Video Interactive, a company that originally started out in content delivery itself but has now focused on anti-piracy measures, has gained some traction with its SmartMark watermarking technology. Working in conjunction with certified partners such as post-production houses, USA Video Interactive has been able to attract attention from film production and distribution companies.