New DRM player

DigitalContainers has come full circle with this week’s announcement that is has bought patent rights to certain Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies from Wachovia Bank. Who is DigitalContainers and how did they make a loop with no one knowing about them? The technology and ideas behind the company were developed by SiteScape back in 1997-98. The company came up with an idea of “digital containers” that used a combination of public and symmetric key encryption technology for e-commerce. After a series of failed financial moves the company unraveled and the banks stepped in an bought up the patents, says Chip Venters, CEO of the new DigitalContainers and an original SiteScape employee.

After five years doing other things a group that worked on the original patents decided to buy back what they developed and start a new company targeted at DRM and how it applies to e-commerce. The premise behind DigitalContainer technology is to be able to secure, authenticate and track any package of goods, be it music, videos or files, with an added layer of e-commerce. The company used Blowfish encryption, 20:1 compression algorithms and the PKI/Symmetric key authentication combo to create packages of goods that can be delivered securely anywhere on the Internet. A content owner sets the level of security and tracking. It could allow a user to authenticate once, bind the content to a specific machine and allow them to use/play the content as many times as they want. The package could be sent to other users, but any new user would have to pay first before they could access the package content. All authentication is done over the Internet by connecting to a central server. DigitalContainers business plan is to license the intellectual property to other technology companies rather than develop and sell products of their own. To date they’ve garnered $9.5 million in backing.