Tuesday, Feb 26, 2008    Text size: 

Flash Video (FLV) has become increasingly popular lately due to its high quality and reasonable file sizes and is in widespread use on social networking sites such as YouTube and its adult equivalents.

According to the Adobe website, which boasts more than 800 million installations of the software, "Flash Player is the high-performance, lightweight, highly expressive client runtime that delivers powerful and consistent user experiences across major operating systems, browsers, mobile phones, and devices."

While many operators may welcome the ability to protect their content from unauthorized distribution, or "sharing," if doing so is hassle-free for legitimate users; the DRM options for those using Flash video have been limited until now.

The Adobe DRM protocol enables encrypted communication between the Flash player and server that protects the video files, and can even prevent them from playing back on non-Adobe players.

Not everyone is pleased, however, with the level of content access control that the new protection scheme allows.

"We imagine that Adobe has no illusions that this will stop copyright infringement – any more than dozens of other DRM systems have done so," Blogger Seth Schoen posted on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's website. "But the introduction of encryption does give Adobe and its customers a powerful new legal weapon against competitors and ordinary users through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)."

That weapon, Schoen fears, will be turned against the "remix culture" – youth that make their own versions and compilations of other people's videos – among other users that the EFF sees as making "fair use" of copyrighted materials.

While the battle between publisher's needs and consumer's desires will play out over the issue of DRM and its applications, Flash Video content providers now have the option of enhancing their protection from pirates and file-sharers – but that enhanced protection will come at a price, as Adobe's DRM requires its $4,000+ Flash Media Server software.

But is it worth it?

"DRM doesn't move additional product. DRM is grief for honest end-users," Schoen said. "And there's no reason to imagine that new DRM systems will stop copyright infringement any more effectively than previous systems.