Over the last six months we have seen a 180 degree turn in the acceptance of digital rights management (DRM) systems from the likes of Apple, Amazon and now Yahoo.  I suspect that Microsoft is not far behind.   It really is not so surprising when you think about it.  Customers hate it.  The technology is complex.  There is no interoperability of systems.  And the systems simply do not work.   You add it all up and there is little wonder that DRM is being rejected by consumers as well as distributors.  I suspect that within the next year most of the major music content distributors will be offering a DRM’less option.  

So it is quite possible that within a year the music industry will be joining the stock image industry in distributing their content without any encryption based digital rights protection system.   As for the entertainment industry, today there is no major "ITunes- like" source for digital movies to pirate although there are a number of early players.   Will they also go through an adoption cycle of DRM only to reject it downstream?   

So where does this put these industries in their need to protect their content from rampant misuse and theft?   In 2006, worldwide gross revenues generated by the motion pictures industry amounted to over $25 billion while in that same year US gross revenues for premium content generated by the cable industry was over $36 billion. In 2006, piracy is estimated to have cost these industries over $18.2 billion. There are some estimates today that as many as 500,000 digital movies being exchanged illegally over the web.   Our systems have found thousands of these improperly distributed videos.

According to Dan Heller's photography business blog, in 2006, worldwide gross revenues generates by the stock image industry amounted to approximately $2.5B with the majority of this revenue generated by a few large image distributors. While there is no official organization tracking either the size of this market or the amount of piracy, estimates exist that 15% - 30% of represented images are used either out-of-scope or unlicensed. There are some estimates that believe that within the online use category; a whopping 90% of uses are unlicensed.  Our systems have found thousands of improperly distributed images and has been used to track down one of these pirates. The bottom line is that these combined industries are losing over $30 billion to misuse of content according to the MPAA and the RIAA.  

Content owners and distributors today are struggling to develop the business intelligence tools to understand how their content is used in the internet.   They also are in great need of services to enable them to understand how their content is being used and facilitate the proper use of their content.   

Infoflows believe it has the services and capabilities to solve this problem.  We believe that information should flow with low friction to consumers and at the same time it needs to be monitored and tracked.   If you want to learn more about the Fedmark Platform please visit our site at www.infoflows.com.