Managing Rights Management

Podcast with Jake Ward, Digital Freedom Campaign

I spent some time during the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with people from the Digital Freedom Campaign, a group of innovators, artists, students and consumers who know that they also have rights in the copyright debate and who want to make themselves heard.

Sponsors and partners of the DFC include the Consumer Electronics Association, Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Home Recording Rights Coalition, Educause, and the American Library Association. 

I spoke recently with Jake Ward, a spokesperson for the Digital Freedom Campaign. Our wide-ranging conversation addressed fair use, CD ripping, network neutrality, the MPAA and RIAA, and legislation pending in Congress.

The podcast can be accessed here.

A time index to our conversation follows:

Podcast with Jake Shapiro, Public Radio Exchange (PRX)

In addition to technical solutions for directly managing rights associated with digital assets, I also write occasionally about clearinghouses, rights exchanges, royalty collecting societies, and the like.

I spoke recently with Jake Shapiro, Executive Director of the Public Radio Exchange, a nonprofit service for distribution, peer review, and licensing of radio pieces. Jake is also a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and is a member Two Ton Shoe, a band with a large following in the US and South Korea.

We spoke about a broad range of topics relating to public radio and audio programming, independent producers, PRX as market place, their successful efforts to reach young content producers through their "Generation PRX" site and service, and the all important editorial / selection functions performed by publishers, distributors, and exchanges.

The podcast can be accessed here.

A time index to our conversation follows:

Podcast with Andy Nobbs, President, Teletrax

I spoke recently with Andy Nobbs, President and managing director, of Teletrax, a company that presently offers content tracking services to the TV broadcast (linear TV) and distribution industries. We covered many topics, including the direction of markets away from DRM and toward watermarking and fingerprinting. Apologies for imperfections in the audio at a couple of points in the recording.

Among the more interesting points was that watermarking has an advantage over fingerprinting when dealing with similar news clips, for example, two clips from different sources of the same event shot by different cameras from similar vantage points. In such circumstances, watermarking might have a clear advantage over fingerprinting since the latter might not be able to effectively distinguish among the two clips.

Here's the File to download (14:50 Minutes, MP3):

Index and topics:

00:00 Introductions
00:15 Overview of Teletrax, Andy Nobbs
01:30 Teletrax history, using watermarking from Philips
02:42 Transactional information to content owners
03:50 Content owners increasingly interested in Internet space
05:18 Fingerprinting vs. watermarking
08:03 The evolving content identification toolkit
10:00 DRM vs. content identification techniques
13:34 Teletrax and the Internet
14:32 Thank yous and goodbys

Podcast with Jan Samzelius, CEO of ByteShield

I spoke recently with Jan Samzelius, Chairman and CEO of ByteShield, which provides anti-piracy technologies and services to business and game software markets. An earlier blogicle described how the ByteShield solution works.

Here's the Podcast file (7:11 Minutes, MP3):

Download jan_samzelius_ceo_byteshield_podcast_91907.mp3

Index:

0:00 Introductions
0:11 Overview of ByteShield, brief history
0:40 The work factor or effort required to break copy protection
1:19 What's different about the ByteShield technology
2:38 Business model
3:11 Broad range of consumer licensing models supported
3:43 Advantages
4:40 Current customers, partners
5:34 Technology and services provider
6:05 Solving the piracy problem
6:55 Close

Podcast With Larry Roth, VP, Cinea

Recently, I spoke by phone with Larry Roth, Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, of Cinea, a division of Dolby. The conversation focused on Ciena's Running Marks Forensic Watermarking solution. [The Podcast is a lightly edited version of our conversation.]

Here's the Podcast:

Download larry_roth_vp_cinea_podcast_91207.mp3

Index:

0:00 Introductions
0:20 Brief overview of Cinea
0:55 Forensic watermarking, Cinea's Running Marks
1:28 Backtracking to the source of the content
1:57 Solving the problem of content piracy
3:19 Running Marks is imperceptible
4:16 Robustness
5:00 Cinea's business model
5:40 Ultralight weight encoder
6:18 Preprocessing content
7:01 Competitive advantage, differentiators
8:03 Future trends, directions
8:47 Close

Podcast with Hank Risan, Media Rights Technologies CEO

I recently interviewed Hank Risan, CEO of Media Rights Technologies. As noted in these pages, MRT has issued a number of press releases that appear to threaten legal action and/or remind content distributors and software companies of their obligations under various US laws, including, but not limited to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Here's The Podcast

Download Hank_Risan_CEO_Media_Rights_Tech_July_19_07.mp3

00:00 Introductions
00:15 MRT Backgrounder, History
02:37 Ted Fitzgerald, CTO
03:09 MRT's BlueBeat.com secure music service
04:34 MRT's Secure X1 DRM and Security Software
05:26 MRT Enables secure distribution and compensation for artists
06:23 DRM Free Music Isn't Really DRM Free
07:53 MRT's Press Releases and Legal Stratgy
10:32 Software Business Models and the Lack of Compensation For Artists
12:15 MRT is a Grass Roots Movement Supported By Artists
13:03 Artists are at risk and should be compensated
14:31 Thank yous and goodbys