After three years locked in R&D, BreakerTech Ltd, an Aylesbury, UK company, will next month release its debut product, SoftSEAL, an anti-online copyright infringement package for web publishers. BreakerTech claims SoftSeal will protect sites against piracy, as well helping publishers to meet their copyright proptection obligations online.
SoftSEAL differs from rival products, such as that from Magex, the joint venture between Natwest Bank Plc and InterTrust Technology Corp. Both systems encrypt copyrighted files and tag them with relevant address and ownership information, but whereas Magex wraps the file in a layer of code that handles the transaction rules for that file, SoftSEAL simply places the brief header information in the document before encryption. This means that Magex files will be slightly larger than SoftSEAL’s, but in the case of a large MP3 file, for example, the relative difference would be negligible.
In the BreakerTech system, business rules are kept on a remote license server, the IP address of which is kept in the header, and the copyrighted file must connect to it to receive the decryption key every time it tries to launch. This presents a possible barrier to consumer uptake in that each time users wish to hear a music track or read a document they have paid for and downloaded, they must make sure their PC is connected to the internet. In most European countries that means paying a per-minute connection charge. It also means the publisher knows at what time and how often an individual customer uses a product, due to the logging info sent back to the server – good for the publisher, possibly uncomfortable for the consumer.
To address some of these concerns, BreakerTech says it will eventually develop a system whereby a limited number of usage licenses are held locally on a user’s PC, to reduce the amount of ping-pong traffic between client and server. License servers will initially arrive in two forms. BreakerTech will run what it calls the Bureau – a service in which it will handling the license servers for its smaller clients, taking around 12% of each initial transaction fee, 4% of which will be passed on to its credit clearinghouse partner.
Larger customers will be able to buy their own license server software to host in-house, but no price has yet been fixed. After the initial release of SoftSEAL, a third party bureau offering will be made available, to allow ISPs and the like to offer the service. Unlike some other systems which have uniform payment structures handled by single banks, BreakerTech’s system could end up using many different clearinghouses and payment formats. Initially, the problem of transferring bought SoftSEAL items between PCs and PDAs or notebooks will not be addressed, but BreakerTech says its working on it.
The company in its present state was founded from a merger of Breaker Technologies Ltd, owned by managing director Dr Martin Lambert, and web design firm WildWood Technology Ltd, owned by business development director Peter Kumik. The main source of funding is US venture capitalist Pond Ventures, which pumped in an as-yet-undisclosed sum two months ago.
