What the best solution for securing from all saving and copying techniques in the publishing industry without damaging the reader experience (exemple an e-newsletter) ?
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Sallie G.
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There isn't one. In general, DRM (digital rights management) interferes far more with the experience of honest people than with criminals. There's not much a professional hacker couldn't crack and redistribute; the Home Shoplifting Network on Usenet is proof of that.
You can use secured PDFs to prevent people from printing, editing, and copying, and then only a really determined person will take a screen shot, scan it in, run it through Optical Character Recognition, and go merrily ahead and do all the things you were trying to prevent. PDF security is at least fairly unobtrusive, and it's generally a good idea to use.
But the only things that would come close to providing you with unbreakable security would make it so difficult to access the information that people probably won't bother trying, or they'll spend more time complaining about the DRM than taking whatever action you wanted them to take as a result of reading your newsletter.
The best thing is probably to establish your brand and style in such a way that people will automatically recognize the content as yours if someone tries to pass off a copy. (And there are ways to track where your articles show up.)
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Nancy F.
Friendly Media Production & Marketing
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turn it into audio or video . . . harder to steal but lower value in some sense because its harder to search.
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Einat A.
Partner at Marketing First
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As mentioned above, securing your newsletter will result in lower usability for
users. For example, some people find it hard to read from the screen and
may give up on a long article if they can't print it.
You should consider what is the use and audience of your newsletter. If you
use it to nurture clients and prospects, then there is no reason to include
sensitive information in it. You can also use summaries and point people
to the paid research. An example: "our research finds that 20% of small
businesses are expecting growth in 2008" with a link to the full report.
In general, you shouldn't include sensitive proprietary info in a free
newsletter.
If the newsletter is a paid service, and you want to make it accessible to
users in a digital form, it's perfectly ok to use all the .pdf protections, and
perhaps allow printing, or offer subscribers to mail them the report.
Good luck with your venture,
Einat Adar
Marketing Communications Manager
✔ C.
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If the online publication were distributed through the web, it could be displayed through a Flash/Silverlight viewer which could prevent a user from printing or copying it (similar to the way youtube and gofish protect videos)... But the reading technology itself needs to be designed to affect the reader in a positive way.
Also, I have found that the most valuable e-content contains a mix of words, videos, demonstrations and other animations that are not easily re-recordable.
So, perhaps creating multi-dimensional content provides a better user experience with less propensity for copying.
Jake S.
Technologist, Strategist, Innovator, Leader
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The answers here are very good and very topical. So forgive me if I appear to veer off topic, but I feel you might be better served approaching your issue from a different angle.
I interpret your question as wanting to know how you can protect content that will be distributed in a traditional method, meaning where the consumer is essentially unknown and anonymous, or at the very least outside your control. As others have stated, the short answer is that you really can't prevent retention of your content by someone who is bound and determined to do it. So instead of trying, ask yourself where the real value lies. Is it in the content itself, or in its producer? If you can think of ways to attach value to yourself as the producer rather than what you produce, then you've insulated yourself at least somewhat from the damage of plagiarism, etc.
The analogy I'd use is a newspaper publisher. Anyone can plagiarize content in a newspaper; but that's not the focus of the paper's business model. Rather, the paper has intrinsic value by positioning itself as a trusted source for *future* content, not just what's in it today. People subscribe because of the value attached to the expectation of ongoing information. This is a good thing because the paper doesn't have the resources to pursue every last infringer on its content, so it doesn't try. Rather, it changes the value proposition.
By all means, protect your content using reasonable means, but not to the point that it damages the consumer's ability to enjoy it, because the value you want to create is in the relationship between the consumer and yourself, not the consumer and the content.
