RFID to Stop Digital Piracy

Filed in archive RFID Basics on May 16, 2005

The Motion Picture Association of America says the U.S. motion picture industry loses $3 Billion annually due to movie piracy.

So, a group of researchers thinks it may have a way to use RFID to stop digital piracy:

"A group of researchers at UCLA is working on a new RFID application that would provide consumers a means of watching DVDs of movies as soon as they hit the theaters. It could also be used to address one of Hollywood's biggest concerns: piracy of digital content. The group is researching a method of using RFID as a tool for digital rights management (DRM), wherein technologies are employed to protect media files from unauthorized use. Digital rights management is also used to process payment to compensate copyright holders for the use of their intellectual property. Apple computer's iTunes application, which lets users purchase music for 99 cents per song, is an example of a digital rights management platform.

The UCLA research group is developing the software and hardware components of a system that would embed DVDs with an RFID tag and DVD players with an RFID reader so that the tagged DVDs would play only in RFID-enabled players and only if the reader could authenticate the DVD's tag. In order to authenticate, the player would also need to link to some type of online network, similar to the EPCglobal Network, that would associate the DVD with a legal sale. Through this system, the copyright owners (the film production company and any other license-holders of the content) would have digital rights management over the work. But viewers would not be able to play the DVDs without an RFID-enabled player because the tag would essentially lock the disc."

My view? While this might make for interesting research, the application is not very practical.

(1) It won't stop the worst kinds of piracy. The source of most piracy is illegally stolen films leaked by industry insiders, not the average citizen Copying a DVD.

(2) Digital downloads of videos will start taking the place of movies distributed on a physical medium like a DVD. By the time this research is completed and a product ready for production, we could be well down that path.