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Inside the Brackets:

[SealedMedia DRM]

by Jeff Wood     Feb 2003

In each issue, this section focuses on a different content management-related product, providing an overview of information specifically targeted to publishers.

The issue of electronic content security and distribution is rapidly becoming a primary focus of publishing companies, software developers, and media distributors everywhere. The concept of DRM, initially embraced by those in the business of distributing music or other forms of multimedia, is now being adopted by traditional publishers as a means to finally be able to distribute electronic content without fear of piracy, illegal file sharing, or overwhelming their customer base with difficult technologies.

At the forefront of this new wave is SealedMedia, who has been in the process of developing such an application since 1996. Headquartered in the UK with offices in the US and abroad, SealedMedia's suite of cross-media DRM applications create new opportunities for publishers to create a single form of content-whether it is a PDF, HTML, Word, Excel, image, video, or audio file-and maintain various levels of document rights in a forum separate from the content itself.

The core component of the SealedMedia software universe is the License Server, a SQL database that is configured to store and distribute user rights to "sealed" content in a centralized location. The License Server works in conjunction with two other SealedMedia products, known simply as the Sealing Tools and Unsealer, to make up the end-to-end secure content distribution system. License Server also includes a complete set of API's for integration with popular billing, payment, and subscription management systems. Currently, only the Windows 2000 Server operating system with SQL Server database is supported, but the company is working on extending the platform selections to include Solaris and Oracle 8i database in the near future.

A variety of Sealing Tools enable content and associated metadata to be "sealed" with encryption keys generated and assigned by the License Server. The tools can be employed on a one-off basis, in batch mode, and can also be used to wrap content dynamically generated via user querying. An end-user sealing application is also available as part of the Unsealer application, allowing the content consumer the ability to alter and reseal content for distribution, assuming this right has been assigned in the original sealing of the content.

The Unsealer is a free, 2MB client-side plug-in for Internet Explorer or Netscape that prompts the user for a username and password and communicates directly with the License Server to retrieve the appropriate rights to the content. This transaction is transparent to the user, who can simply view the content following authentication.

The license information can also be cached to the client-side Unsealer application for offline use. Once the user is validated and the content is unsealed, the decrypted file is assigned to the appropriate rendering application (Acrobat Reader, Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, etc.) and can be viewed by the content consumer.

Some examples of how a set of documents or files can be managed with the SealedMedia product include:

• Trial license: establishing a license where content expires 15 minutes after it is first viewed
• Subset license: the user can only gain access to certain files within the content collection
• Scheduled license: content can be purchased but not available until a certain date

Other available license structures can be established to reflect pay-per-view, subscription, and evaluation sales models.

Also available through SealedMedia is what is perhaps the "holy grail" of published content—superdistributon. Initial purchasers of content can forward documents and files to an unlimited number of users, who themselves must obtain the appropriate license rights in order to access the content, providing a new revenue outlet for publishers of electronic content.

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