Piracy and Digital Rights Management of Dvds and the Internet

With widespread use of the Internet and improvements in streaming media and compression technology, digital music, images, DVDs, books and games can be distributed instantaneously across the Internet to end-users. Many digital service providers sell their digital content not only through DVDs but also over computer networks. However, without protection and management of digital rights, digital content can be easily copied, changed, and distributed to a large number of recipients, which could cause revenue loss to media companies. To protect commercial digital intellectual property and avoid digital piracy, we need a system that prevents unauthorized access to digital content and manages content usage rights. (Liu and Safavi-Naini and Sheppard 2003) Estimating revenue losses due to illegal downloads is challenging because it is difficult to determine what fraction of illegal downloads result in lost revenue for the industry and whether illegal downloads, through the "free publicity" they generate, have any positive impacts on box office revenues. However, it is likely that redistribution of unauthorized copies through the Internet will increasingly affect DVD movie sales and paid Internet distribution of movies. As the ease of downloading unauthorized copies of movies grows with the availability of low-cost, high-bandwidth Internet connections and peer-to-peer file sharing networks, the movie industry's concerns about illegal downloads is intensifying. These concerns are heightened by unauthorized copies of movies becoming available on the Internet prior to their U.S. theater release (Seiler and Snider 2003)
Piracy is the unauthorized use or reproduction of music, movies, books, and other types of content that are granted protection under copyright law. This kind of protection typically gives the owner of the content the exclusive right to perform certain actions on the content or to authorize others to do so. We recognize that determining whether an action is