Illegal Downloading
With increased connectivity and high speed internet being pushed across the world, is it important to understand the impact it has on software distribution and piracy. In the past, software and media were provided on physical media which was can be difficult to duplicate as it often requires specialist hardware such as a CD-burning drive. Additionally a person needs to get a hold of the physical media in order to duplicate the media. With the advent of high speed internet, it is possible to acquire such media digitally from the comfort of your own home. Technologies that are often used included peer-to-peer networks such as bit-torrent, eDonkey, Limewire. As a result many people and organisations have impacted from this transition to an online age. This has led to an increase in the use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) techniques on digital media in an attempt to curb piracy practises.
Effect on Industry:
It is often said that due to piracy, many industries are losing out on millions of pounds in the domestic market and jobs are lost as a consequence. In Britain it estimated that 27% of all software in use is pirated material and that the value of the illegal software in the UK amounts to £1 billion. A study in 2008 by the International Data Corporation (IDC) showed that if piracy was lowered by 10% over a period of 4 years, could generate 13600 new jobs and bring £4.46 billion to the UK economy. Counterfeit software can also leave the user vulnerable as the software may include malware and often cannot install software patches to remove any vulnerabilities discovered in the software.
Overview of common DRM techniques:
In order to combat piracy, many software vendors adopts a Digital Rights Management (DRM) system of some sort. Some systems are more effective than others though they can also at times hinder paying customers. It is sometimes suggested that instead of imposing strict DRM, it can be more effective to add give an incentive to purchase the media (e.g. bundle a poster with a music album). Here are some of the most common DRM techniques that are used:
- License Files - Program checks for the presence of a licence file that verifies that it is a legitimate copy. The licence file includes information of the person to whom the software is licensed to. This information can be used in legal action against users who distributes the software.
- Hardware-based - Checks for the presence of particular hardware or optical media before running the software. Many games require the DVD to be inserted into an optical drive before the game will run. This can also extend to checking that there have been no significant hardware changed, in other words it has been installed on an entirely different machine. This particular check is often used by Microsoft Windows and normally a phone call needs to be made to Microsoft in order to install Windows onto a new machine (having removed it from an old machine).
- Online Authentication - The program verifies that the copy of the media is legitimate before running. Some versions of this technique requires that you have a constant internet connection. This method has a single point of failure as server downtime would result in all users unable to run the media.For example a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack could potentially crash a server.