geek research question

[serene]

Calling all geeks: I'm researching a software need for work. You remember in the old days before YouTube, when people wanted to share video content on the web, they would put something up that was copy-protected, and you would have to download a special player, and the player would have copy protection in the form of some sort of licensing/password admin? (Put another way, the video could be played by me on my machine with my password/IP/whatever, but I couldn't just email the video to you so you could see it -- you'd have to buy/rent/license it too.)

I know that stuff must still exist, but I don't know what any of it is called, and I could use some narrowing terms for my search, as you can imagine that the lion's share of the websearch hits for "copy protection" are talking about legal battles.

Any ideas?

Comments

[jb98.livejournal.com]

I was thinking along the lines of this last night, but I wasn't thinking of restricting the player, just the file. That wouldn't solve the problem of emailing the file once someone obtained it. Mind if I link your question in my journal? I'm totally interested in what our geeky friends come up with!

[ptor.livejournal.com]

I don't know of any commercial solutions. But I'm not really informed about such software.

Digital Rights Management is sort of a difficult and silly problem that requires increasingly complicated solutions.

To really lock things down, you have to have fascistic control of all the hardware: DVD players, Xbox, the whole Trusted Computing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing) scheme. And then some guy in Norway (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVD_Jon) will crack it anyway...

Hopefully, only a reasonable effort is required?

Good luck!