So, in my previous few posts on this topic - I have somewhat neglected covering the practical alternatives. Things that can be made to work, and can be difficult if not impossible to break. I’ve made some mentions before on things that can be done, but I’m going to elaborate on them here.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

To begin with, we’re going to need to make a divide between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ consumers - good consumers are going to be defined as your standard consumers - the people who like to purchase legitimate content from the legitimate sellers - and like to know that they have bought legitimate content.

The second group are the group who dont really mind if they purchase pirated content (or get it for free), this group is somewhat of a lost cause. They dont tend to buy content today, and they probably wont change that habit in the future.

What you want to target is not minimising the size of the second group (all that will do is waste time and is unlikely to get you any kind of extra revenue), but preventing as many of the first group from slipping into the second group (intentionally or unintentionally)

Signing content

Just like a signed copy of a book is worth more than the plain hardcover, it’s possible to sign a purchase with a “To <buyer>, I <content creator here> can affirm this is a legitimate copy that was sold to you.”, there’s a few ways of doing this, number one:

Verifying purchases via a server

Have a registration server - anyone can see the signature of your item and confirm it against the server to see if the person who has it legitimately bought it. This does have the downside that you need to maintain your server ad-infinium if you want people to be able to verify your content.

Verifying purchases via cryptography

This is a niftier solution, and should work for all time as long as people have a copy of something called your “public key”. This means that when you sell the item to someone, you add a digital signature to the purchase with “XYZ bought this from me.” and then sign that message with something called your “private key”. As long as your public key is public - anyone can use it to verify it was you who really signed it.

Pros of Signing Content

• People can verify that a purchase they made came from the original creator legitimately.
• Other people can verify it too - lowering the social value of possessing fakes.
• Helps build up a brand

Cons of Signing Content

• Relies on people recognising content to be able to say it was a fake of designer X.
• You need to probably rely on a mix of both cryptographic signatures and verification services which will likely involve a cost - for a identity-verified cryptographic keypair (such as the ones Verisign provide), and the cost of hosting the service.

Fingerprinting (”Watermarking”)

It’s possible to take a digital asset, and produce a fingerprint of it - fingerprints, like their physical counterpart are very good signatures of someone, but they arent someone themselves. In digital terms this means producing a smaller version of the asset that is unique to it, and registering it so that if any “clone” shows up, it can be said to be derived from the original asset.

Services exist already for print media which register these fingerprints so that if they are ever used elsewhere, someone can verify who originally made the asset.

Pros of fingerprints

• You can verify a fingerprint with a third party to see the original creator of the item.
• Help when filing copyright infringement notices because you have the registration to act as a “I did this first”.

Cons of fingerprints

• Fingerprints cannot tell if something is or is not legitimate alone.
• Fingerprints can be “smudged” by tampering with the asset, the more “smudge-resistant” you make it, the higher chance false positives can occur.

Make it as easy to buy legitimate content, reward those who do.

This one is more of a business opportunity for some individual or group - but make it possible to buy your content on an amazon/iTunes equivilent which is quick and easy to purchase from, and guaruntees legitimate content.

If your content is a pain to purchase, the chances of someone getting frustrated and either nor purchasing, or getting via less-than-legitimate means increases. Reward the consumers who do purchase legitimate content with updates and other services that people getting the false one wont - as a side bonus this will instill some brand loyalty and likely get them buying more content from you in future.

None of these ideas are mutually exclusive - they work best together.

Fingerprinting is complemented nicely when you have signatures attached - in doing so, you can combine them to say “This is not a legitimate item, the original was created by XYZ who’s signature is missing”. By doing so, you can place social pressure on people to purchase the real thing.

While there will always be a group (mentioned above) who dont care - the majority (the good consumer group) will, and will likely try purchase legitimate whenever possible. If merchants present their digital signatures and a third-party verification as part of the purchase process, then it becomes signficiantly more difficult to buy a fake unintentionally.

One last thing

This list is not a total list - it’s what I thought of in five minutes. There’s plenty of other ideas which can be made to work, a lot of it requires third party verification from reputable services, but thankfully neither of these is a new thing. Digimarc provide watermark/fingerprinting services with registration already today for print/web media, and Verisign provide the cryptographic keys nessecary for signing content. (The algorithms for which are very well documented already having been invented at least thirty years ago)

There’s a very fundamental problem facing many content creators in Virtual Worlds these days (such as Second Life™, IMVU™ and others), and that is the problem of Piracy - where one unscrupulous individual takes content from a designer or developer, and then attempts to resell it as their own.

It’s a problem - no-one can deny that, but the solution to the problem is not ‘deep’ DRM. There are a few reasons for this, especially when it comes to content (scripts and backend programming are another matter entirely and something I will get to in a moment)

Three reasons why this wont work for visual content

First, the obvious one - content must be displayed on the users screen. This means it must be presented to the video card in an unencrypted form. I’ve heard a few silly ideas to prevent this one, such as encrypting the texture and using a shader to decrypt it on the video card (just run the shader in a virtual machine).

At a very fundamental level, the laws of mathematics do not allow you to say “This number cannot be copied.”, computers which are based on very high level mathematics are still subject to these immutable laws. There’s a parallel law here which states that you can always modify something - sure you can make it a house of cards that breaks if you make a change, but someone can always employ superglue to prevent that.

It’s technical, but it’s worth reading the examination of the Skype binary (PDF) done by a security analysis team, the Skype developers know their stuff, exactly how to use cryptography properly, how to try prevent debuggers from being run, etc. Every single one of their protections has been examined and detailed specifically in that document - no matter how clever you think you are, there are cleverer people out there and not all of them have good motivations.

Second reason why this wont work - You hand the legitimate user both the content and the key to decrypt it to display it - there’s no way to avoid this without disallowing the user to view the item (which defeats the purpose of content). There’s nothing stopping them from making a copy of both parts, and once the schema is broken, there’s no going back - it’s out there. You cant revise the encryption scheme after it’s been broken, your content is now available unencrypted.

This has been a big problem with things like DVD encryption, because to release a new encryption scheme you need to get every user to update, and titles released under the old scheme are still broken. DRM used in popular products tends to have a life somewhere between a week and three months - assuming point #1 doesn’t hold, this still means you have to assume all your content more than at most 3 months old is piratable - how many content producers produce enough content every month to make their old lines completely redundant from a sales perspective?

Third reason - DRM tends to annoy customers. Consider the possibility where you want to teleport your avatar around a hypothetical super-grid the size of the internet. You enter a sim which hasnt been authorised (and I’d say in the long term, most will fall into this class - similar to only how a small % of sites have SSL certificates), and bam, your avatar vanishes.

Well, what can you do? Not much - but you arent likely to buy avatars from this user again that’s for certain. There is likely going to be a commercial incentive towards content which after you buy is free to do what you want with. (With copyright law enforcing violators and pirates).

So - how the hell do you protect your revenue/sales in an environment where anything goes?

This question is the real question that should be asked, the answer hasnt yet been determined (market forces will likely be the ones to figure out which models work, and which dont)

• Custom Content - in a world where everything is mass produced and cloned, unique content that has been hand crafted for what you want is a drawcard. It’s unique, it’s yours, it’s $50.00/hour design fees.
• Keep on keeping on - The current model is unlikely to collapse, brands seem to matter and people like being able to say they have legitimate content. Systems will likely appear that allow you to verify whether someone has paid for a piece of content or not. Piracy goes on in virtual worlds today, but sellers seem to keep making sales (I’d like to know more from specific sellers how their sales have gone when a piece of content has been pirated significantly).
• Mark your intent - Tying in with the above point is the idea that you can mark your intent - this is ’shallow’ DRM - it’s nothing that cannot be removed, but it does signify what the creator wanted you to do with this content and has licensed you to do. If someone violates these terms, you can deal with them the same way copyright infringement is handled in the real world, courts. For all the complaints that go on about the DMCA, the act does provide a relatively sane way to deal with IP infringement from a content creator perspective (however beware, filing a false DMCA claim IS perjury).

So what about scripts?

Well, if your script is going to be transmitted from host to host - you have the same problems that commercial web scripts have - and all of the above applies. With sufficient bandwidth and processor time however, it is possible to run scripts on your servers for other peoples (the “hosted” model). OpenSim supports this hosted model via the ScriptEngine that can be run as a grid server - hopefully these kinds of things will become easier to setup and maintain, and perhaps a giant such as Akamai will take to the role for other people.