Pricing digital content with DRM mechanism
Pages 433 - 440
Abstract
The Internet and file sharing technology (such as P2P network) significantly alleviate the content distribution cost. However, better digital content distribution also means that people can acquire any digital contents easier without purchasing the digital rights. Consequently, digital content providers utilize DRM (Digital Right Management) technology to inhibit the diffusion of pirating.
In this paper, we proposed an analytical model to examine the optimal DRM protection and pricing strategies of digital content. We showed that the structure of the digital content industry (the relationship between content and platform providers) and content quality play important roles in the development of these strategies. DRM protection level decreases as the content provider and platform provider are integrated. As a result, more pirating activities occur. While losing revenue from selling content, the merged company recovers this loss and gains from selling platform at a higher price. Higher content quality will always strengthen the adoption of DRM when content and platform providers are operated independently. However, if both providers are integrated, higher content quality may increase or decline DRM protection level. In addition, we observed that providing content with higher quality will increase (decline) both the sales of legal content and corresponding revenue when content quality is sufficiently high (low).
References
[1]
Arora G., M. Hanneghan and M. Merabti, P2P commercial digital content exchange, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, Volume 4, Issue 3, 250--263, Autumn 2005.
[2]
Becker Eberhard, Willms Buhse, Dirk Gunnewig, Niels Rump, Digital Rights Management: Technological, Economic, Legal and Political Aspects, pp.1, 2003.
[3]
Bergemann Dirk, Thomas Eisenbach, Joan Feigenbaum, Scott Shenker, Flexibility as an Instrument in Digital Right Management, Flexibility in Digital Right Management, April 7, 2005.
[4]
Beute Berco, Mobile DRM-usability out the door?, Telematics and Informatics 22, 83--96, 2005.
[5]
Craig Cameron, Richard Graham, Rights management in the digital world, Computer Law & Security Report, Volume 19, Issue 5, 356--362, September 2003.
[6]
Digital Content Value Driving DRM, eMarketer, March 20, 2007.
[7]
Forte Dario, Microsoft RMS to protect "Digital Rights", Network Security, Volume 2003, Issue 7, Page 3, July 2003.
[8]
Gayer Amit, Oz Shy, Internet and peer-to-peer distributions in markets for digital products, Economics Letters 81, 197--203, 2003.
[9]
Givon Moshe, Vijay Mahajan, Eitan Muller, Software piracy: estimation of lost sales and the impact on software diffusion. Journal of Marketing 59, 29--37, 1995.
[10]
Hunter Philip, DRM: Whose Rights are They Anyway?, Computer Fraud & Security, Volume 2002, Issue 2, 1, 14--15, February 2002.
[11]
Ian. Clarke, Scott G. Miller, Theodore W. Hong, Oskar. Sandberg, B. Wiley, Protecting free expression online with freenet, IEEE Internet Computing 6 (1), 40--49, 2002.
[12]
IFPI Press Release London, April 9, 2003.
[13]
Irwin James, Digital Rights Management: The Open Mobile Alliance DRM Specifications, Information Security Technical Report, Volume 9, Issue 4, 22--31, December 2004.
[14]
Kundur Deepa, Heather Yu, Ching-Yung Lin, Security and digital rights management for mobile content. In: Content Delivery in Mobile/Wireless Internet. John Wiley & Sons, p. 2003.
[15]
Kwok S. H., C. C. Yang, K. Y. Tam and Jason S. W. Wong, SDMI-based rights management systems, Decision Support Systems, Volume 38, Issue 1, 33--46, October 2004.
[16]
Kwok S. H., S. C. Cheung, K. C. Wong, K. F. Tsang, S. M. Lui and K. Y. Tam, Integration of digital rights management into the Internet Open Trading Protocol, Decision Support Systems, Volume 34, Issue 4, 413--425, March 2003.
[17]
M. Ripeanu, A. Iamnitchi, I. Foster, Mapping the Gnutella network, IEEE Internet Computing 6 (1), 50--57, 2002.
[18]
MPAA Press Release 22 January 2001 and 1 May 2003.
[19]
Shapiro Carl, Hal R. Varian, Information Rules, Harvard Business School Press, Cambridge, MA., 1999.
[20]
TORRUBIA Andres, Francisco J. MORA and Luis MARTI, Cryptography Regulations for E-commerce and Digital Rights Management, Computers & Security, Volume 20, Issue 8, 724--738 December 2001.
[21]
Varian Hal R., Universal access to information, Communication of the ACM, vol. 48 (10), 2005, pp. 65--66.
Index Terms
- Pricing digital content with DRM mechanism
Recommendations
Pricing schemes for digital content with DRM mechanisms
In this paper, utilizing game-theoretic model, we examine the impact of collaborative structure, content quality, and network environment on the development of pricing scheme and DRM protection policy of digital content. DRM protection level decreases ...
Digital rights management for content distribution
ACSW Frontiers '03: Proceedings of the Australasian information security workshop conference on ACSW frontiers 2003 - Volume 21Transferring the traditional business model for selling digital goods linked to physical media to the online world leads to the need for a system to protect digital intellectual property. Digital Rights Management(DRM) is a system to protect high-value ...
Optimal Recommendation and Long-Tail Provision Strategies for Content Monetization
HICSS '14: Proceedings of the 2014 47th Hawaii International Conference on System SciencesThis paper examines the optimal strategies for pricing, contents variety supply and recommendation system investment by digital contents providers. With the fast development of digitalization technology and social participation in recent years, the ways ...
Comments
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
August 2007
482 pages
ISBN:9781595937001
DOI:10.1145/1282100
- Conference Chairs:
- Maria Gini,
- Robert J. Kauffman,
- General Chair:
- Donna Sarppo,
- Program Chairs:
- Chris Dellarocas,
- Frank Dignum
Copyright © 2007 ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]
In-Cooperation
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 19 August 2007
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Article
Conference
ICEC07
ICEC07: Ninth International Conference on Electronic Commerce
August 19 - 22, 2007
MN, Minneapolis, USA
Acceptance Rates
Overall Acceptance Rate 150 of 244 submissions, 61%
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 592Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)0
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
Reflects downloads up to 05 Mar 2025
Other Metrics
Citations
View Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in