Flash as a cheap DRM Tool

Recently I self-published a book called Web Designers Success Guide. After being not-so thrilled with publishing with larger publishers (they tend to give you fat advance and you never see royalities due to “hidden” clauses in the big old contract you sign) I decided to write and publish my own book using Lulu. The process is simple, you create your book in what ever program you want (I use InDesign CS2) and then upload it as a PDF. They print it on demand as people buy it. Lulu offers authors the ability to sell the book as a PDF and via dead tree (paper). I decided that selling the PDF would be bad since my target audience are very wired web designers and my PDF would end up making the old Peer-to-Peer book tour and I won’t get paid!

PDF and DRM
So I locked my book in paper for now. I did alot of research to find an affordable solution to host my PDF so people could read and print it out… but not copy and share the PDF. I found some very costly solutions such as LockLizard and WebPublisher for locking down my PDF to the server so people can’t ’share it’ with their friends. I also found a whole host of other solutions provided by not-so trust worthy companies that many not be here tommorow. In fact if you do a search for DRM and eBooks using Google you will find all sorts of fly-by-night operators who offer “DRM” for files. Most of these companies require you to host using their systems. The problem is most of these companies don’t give a phone number or address for their business, something that scares the hell out of me. So the only real solutions seem to be expensive ones.

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What does any of this have to do with Flash and DRM?
You thought you where reading an arcticle on Flash and DRM? well you are… after doing alot of searching I have discovered that you can use Flash to achieve a high degree (while not full proof) form of DRM. One of my clients wanted to create a full site using Flash. (see why I think this is a bad idea for usability here) Other than making cool animations and such, the main thrust for creating the site in Flash was to stop or slow down users from stealing the content from the site. In fact the Flash site does a really nice job of making stealing content much more difficult than traditional HTML or even a PDF.

Using some tricks we used to slow people down:

• The old rip from the browser cache trick
  Users just open up their browser cache and pilage the   SWF’s from their own hard drive. We added   internal actionscript code that disables the SWF if it isn’t played from the orginal server. This also stops the old post “my content” on your server trick!
• Print Screen (PrtScn Button Trick)
  While you can’t totally disable this, you can make it frustrating for the average user by “trapping” for the “print screen” button. And telling Flash to copy blankness into the clipboard of the computer. There are easy ways around this (which I won’t reveal) but it’s enough to frustrate uers.
• Remove the “right click”
  While this might seem like a simple option. We used simple embed statements “menu=false” to remove the print command from the “right click” menu. This alone is often enough to discourage users from copying the content. Remebber users can always just “print” the page from the browser. A way around this is to just have a really high-frame rate to your movie. Maybe flicker a white box infront of the screen (although this may cause seizures?) So when they “print” the page… parts of it will be whited out. Although I’m unsure how this might effect reading… the flicker my get annoying!?!?
• Local Shared Objects
  Using local shared objects (Flash’s answer to the cookie) we can also do some other fun things to discourage users from messing with the Flash content.

Of course there are many ways around this. Advanced users can get their hands on de-compilers for Flash (there are many around) and users can just circumvent the print screen by using “other tools”. But for the most part if you have a subscription site where you want to at least slow people down from ripping you off using Flash as a good DRM tool is a cheap and effective way to do it without spending thousands. And you can be assured that there are ways around those expensive PDF DRM solutions as well. Ours is cheap and doesn’t require the user to install a different plugin… It works very well right with the Flash Plugin they have installed already.

So how does this apply to my book?
In the up-coming months I plan to launch my book, along with many other articles I have written in the past as the form of a subscription based website. This site will be completely built in Flash and will utilize all of the DRM topics I discussed above. The idea here is to slow down the copying of the material to the point where it doesn’t effect the bottom line too much.   As with all DRM solutions there is no “magic bullet” users who are determained will always find away around to steal the content. But the most important method is to make it soo painful the average user won’t bother, thus making it easier to make doing business this way profitable.