What are the tools available to combat online piracy? I wrote about a few of them for DGA Quarterly, the Directors’ Guild of America’s craft magazine.

As technology evolves, new and better tools are becoming available to combat Internet theft and protect intellectual property. Online theft is not going to go away, but now content creators can protect their work and help ensure a fair deal for themselves and paying consumers.

If something is visible or audible on a computer, it can be copied. It only takes one computer-literate pirate to make a single unprotected copy of a film or TV program for it to become available to everyone on the Internet, free of charge. The only barrier to entry for prospective file-sharers is mastery of a simple set of computer programs designed specifically to find and share music and video. It really is as simple as “point” and “click.”

It’s true that the Internet has enabled copyright infringement on an unprecedented scale: millions of illegally pirated files are now available for download to anyone with a broadband connection. But this doesn’t mean that the battle against Internet theft can’t and shouldn’t be fought and—to some extent—won. Here is a brief survey of the tools that are out there and how they can be used to protect your work.

Digital Rights Management (DRM)

Historically, this has been the most common form of digital copy protection, but to date it has not been particularly effective. DRM describes a set of rules or controls embedded within the content itself that are designed to prevent unauthorized viewing or listening—for example, by preventing playback on devices that are not owned by the purchaser (this is how Apple’s FairPlay system, used in its iTunes Store, operates). In reality, digital media files employing DRM can have that protection stripped away by experienced thieves in a matter of minutes. The content can then be duplicated an unlimited number of times, with no reduction in quality, as if there had been no protection applied at all.

Every widely used DRM system has been rapidly defeated by pirates. The Content Scrambling System (CSS), introduced in 1996 by the DVD Forum, has been practically useless since 1999. The Advanced Access Content System (AACS) for HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs was “cracked” in December 2006: the first unprotected HD movie appeared on peer-to-peer file-sharing sites, complete with audio options and special features, less than two weeks later. DVD region codes, another attempt to limit international piracy, can be circumvented very easily on a modern computer—not to mention using one of a widely available range of multi-region DVD players.

DRM is sometimes perceived as reducing the value of a paid product, for example when a piece of software needs to “phone home” via the Internet in order to be installed or operated. This occasionally results in inconveniences to legitimate customers if, for instance, authentication servers are offline or the user is not connected to the Web.

Nonetheless, DRM is still widely used as an extra layer of deterrence. It forms part of an integrated toolkit of anti-piracy technologies, but should never be considered a complete means of protection in itself.

Read the remainder of this article at DGA Quarterly’s website.