Shield: Product Development in a Distributed Team

Appendix A

Shield Description

Digital rights management (DRM) refers to the ability to create and associate rights to digital information and to modify those rights over time. The term DRM was coined by a combination of vendors, their marketers, and industry analysts in the late 1990s. The advent of electronic media, such as books and music, poses the challenge of their distribution over the Internet or within a corporate intranet. Content owners want to know that no matter who downloads the document, and no matter how many times it is copied or distributed offline, the media remain protected. In addition, royalty payments may have to be made to authors based on document usage. In this context, “rights” are what the content provider owns and “permissions” (e.g., viewing, editing, printing and redistribution) refers to what the consumer is granted, usually in exchange for payment or information. Each participant in the value chain is restricted to handling content in a manner consistent with the permissions they own. For example, a consumer may acquire the right to view a document but be restricted from printing or redistribution.

Shield is a suite of software components for the management of digital property rights. Shield enables content owners to attach rights and conditions to digital content, enforce those rights during distribution and track usage and royalties. A typical transaction enabled by Shield may look as follows. Content may be created in Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat PDF, or HTML. Shield encrypts the content to ensure document security. The encrypted content is hosted by an e-commerce website. Content owners can create versions of documents that consumers may peruse but neither download nor print. When ready to purchase a document, the consumer simply selects the desired permissions and a payment method. The consumer then downloads an encrypted version of the document that is embedded with the granted permissions. When a consumer electronically forwards content to another user, the new consumer is automatically directed to the content provider’s e-commerce site and required to obtain rights to the content.