Desktop Digital Rights Management

[mcguffin]

We've gone in circles around the question of can you protect images you post on the web. From what I've seen, the general consensus is: "if a browser can see it, then a user can capture it."

However, there's an interesting article about desktop DRM in ZDNet today, DRM Heads to Your Desktop [zdnet.com.com]

A CEO whose company provides DRM document repositories to lawyers says:

There really isn't much more confidential stuff in the business world than what we protect," he said. "We make sure people can't copy or even take a screenshot of a document.

I was intrigued by the company's claim that they could prevent prevent screen capture applications. I didn't think that sort of lockdown was possible.

This solution doesn't seem like it would work with web data and images, but it suggests interesting possibilities down the line.

[rogerd]

The reason it's easy to copy web images via screen capture is that the operating system that enables the capture process isn't tied into the rights management scheme. It looks like MS is getting into DRM in a big way, so it certainly seems possible that it could check a web screen capture to see if the page contained a protected image.

If the screen capture feature in Windows were hobbled, though, I'd expect third-party utilities to become popular.

[cwebb]

I'd expect better third party solution to become popular, too, but the majority of users won't blame MS if something doesn't work, but the website.

And the majority of users won't download additional software. See Netscape... It's only us "geeks" who get every available software and stuff ;)