The law can't protect your copyrights, but software can.
See a Web article you like? Cut and paste, and presto--it's a part of your newsletter. Great-looking picture on that site? Right click and it's your wallpaper. The wacky video file that makes you split your sides? E-mail it to 432 of your closest friends. Too bad those days are over.
Peter Levy, CEO of Vyou.com (pronounced view dot-com), wants to give Web publishers complete control over who saves, copies, forwards, and even prints their Web pages. Thanks to his company's Vyoufirst software, site owners can now fully protect their intellectual property by establishing "content access policies" for static or streaming media. Software, it turns out, isn't as easily broken as the law.
What's a content access policy? It's a set of rules that determines how online content may be used, effectively lobotomising computers to the level of televisions. In other words, site owners using Vyoufirst can turn off the ability to print, copy, paste, or save a Web page or any of the images on it, and even deny the ability to view the source code of Web pages or take a screenshot. Because the Vyoufirst system is Web-centric (as opposed to the file-centric systems used to protect high-value digital content like Stephen King's Riding the Bullet e-book), the adoption of the technology could herald a radical change in what's free on the Web.
End of days
"I think it could be the end of the wild, woolly Web," says Bonnie Brooks, an analyst with Creative Strategies. Brooks sees Vyoufirst as a natural fit for the education market, where content security is a real need. "Professors do not want to put their stuff online because it gets stolen," she explains.
Nothing would make Internet (and intranet) content providers happier than reliable intellectual property protection. By all accounts, piracy is rampant--the International Intellectual Property Association estimates losses due to piracy in 1999 at US$8.669 billion worldwide. While figures that apply specifically to online piracy remain largely anecdotal, few dispute the severity of the problem.
Hoping to provide some relief, a handful of companies are scrambling to bring copyright enforcement schemes like digital rights management (DRM) and integrated document management (IDM) to market. Among them: Adobe, Aliroo, Authentica, Entrust, InterTrust, Marimba, Pitney Bowes, Reciprocal, Tumbleweed, UPS, and Xerox.
