How to Protect your Digital Products from being Stolen.
Stolen is a word that’s been thrown around a lot in recent months, with every other week bringing some new article about the ever-growing number of pirated copies present on the internet. But with so much talk going on about how piracy is destroying music and film industry, it should come as no surprise that people are looking for ways to protect their products from being stolen. And luckily - there are many! From DRM to Digital Rights Management, from image recognition to watermarks - there are plenty of ways you can stop your digital product from being copied or leaked. Here at Byte's blog, we’ll be discussing some of the most common and basic methods available for protecting your digital products from being stolen.
Digital Rights Management is a commonly used method for protecting digital products. It’s used by big corporations to protect their incredibly expensive and custom made software or games, such as Microsoft and Apple. Basically, DRM comes in the form of algorithms that are embedded into the software itself. These algorithms protect the file from being copied by limiting its functionality each time it’s opened on a new device. For instance, when you buy an ebook from Amazon, you’ll receive two files: one HTML file and one Kindle AZW file. The latter can only be opened on a Kindle device or an AZ reader app while the former can be read anywhere thanks to HTML’s unlimited compatibility.
APIs are the digital equivalent of your local library. They are meant to protect digital content by opening up only if you have the right authorization, and then only for a time limit. Just like you cannot borrow a book from your local library without it ever being returned, there are many apps that can only be used on specific devices, based on their APIs.
Digital watermarks is another way to protect your digital product from being stolen. By emulating the process of printing with watermarks, users are unable to copy or modify any part of a product that has been marked as watermarked (like images, icons and logos.). However, watermarks only work if the tool is properly implemented by the user's software or hardware setup. The current watermarking tools are often pretty limited in scope, but this could change in the future as more people are taking notice of watermarked digital products.
Digital rights management (DRM) and digital watermarking tools can be used by anyone to protect your digital product from being stolen, but they are also extremely expensive – costing thousands of dollars to implement. There are more affordable methods out there that can provide similar protection.
The first thing you should do is to find out whether or not you can implement your own DRM solution on your product. Most vendors will allow you to customize their products for a fee. This is usually the easiest method of protection, but also the most costly. Similar to paying for a customized version of an existing product, you can always develop your own software to protect your digital product from being stolen. Depending on how in-depth you want your product to be protected, developing your own software will be costly, and time consuming. Nevertheless, this is probably one of the best ways to ensure that no one can do anything with your product other than what you intended – which is exactly what you want when you’re trying to protect a digital product from being stolen.
To help you in your quest to find the perfect combination of protection, we will be exploring the different types of Digital Rights Management or DRM solution in this article. We will explore how they work, and look at some of the more popular methods of protection out there.
The most common form of DRM is Digital Rights Management (DRM). This involves using technologies to prevent copying or sharing of digital products, such as movies and music. Some forms of DRM limit the playback on a single device at time, requiring users to connect it to that device for playback. Others require authorization from all devices before access can be granted.
DRM can limit the functionality of your product, making it impossible to play the product unless certain conditions are met. For example, suppose you have a digital product that requires internet access in order to work – DRM could block playback on devices that do not have internet access. However, this would only be effective if the vendor or publisher guaranteed that their DRM works properly with their products. Some vendors even offer an update for their products which removes DRM if it is found to be faulty.
One of the most common forms of DRM is watermarking, also known as digital watermarking or steganography. Watermarking is a way to embed your data within another data source. It basically turns your digital product into a butterfly, and makes it hard to identify who the owner of the original digital product is.
Butterfly effect is another common method used to protect digital products from being stolen. Butterfly Effect works by preventing a user from copying or modifying critical information in the file. For example, if you were to “mangle” the file by inserting code that would corrupt the file if it were copied or modified, that would be another form of protection against piracy.
Some vendors use a simple encryption to protect their digital products from being stolen. For example, if the product is encrypted with a password, you would have to know the password in order to view or modify the product. This is not very effective because users can simply take it upon themselves to learn the password and then try it out – commonly called reverse engineering. However, this method can be used as an anti-virus check-up for both software and hardware when updating or installing new versions of software and hardware.
One of the more unique forms of DRM is whitelisting. Whitelisting is a way of adding a list of device IDs to your DRM solution that will be allowed to play your digital product. For example, if you have a set of devices that play videos – such as computers and mobile phones – you can whitelist all computer devices in your video’s DRM solution, which means only those specific devices can play the video.
Whitelisting is often combined with other forms of DRM in order to add multiple layers of protection. For example, if you run a gaming company and only want to allow certain users to play your game, you could block everyone except those that are specified in the whitelist.
A network license is a single license shared by a number of users. For example, if you have a database program that allows multiple users to access the database from different computers in the network, you may need to use a network license for that software. Network licenses are protected by DRM that prevents them from being used outside of the network.
There are some DRM solutions out there which can make it possible to revoke and re-distribute your digital product if need be.
Conclusion
The lack of a proper digital privacy policy is another area that needs to be addressed. Privacy policies are often not only left out, but are also ineffective. Most privacy policies don’t protect your personal information, they simply state that it has been collected and will only be used for the stated purpose – which still leaves most of your data open to public exposure. Because it isn’t necessary to have a privacy policy for most projects, taking the right steps to build one will ensure that you can protect your project from being stolen – both before and during its life cycle.