cSafe Ltd, a one-year-old Israel-based company, has come up with a system that enables companies wishing to place copyrighted pictures on the web to do so without the risk of seeing them copied, printed and distributed beyond their control. The company is so confident there is a demand for the software that it has bumped up the price from a reported $1,000 in April, to $10,000 plus transaction fees this week.
PixSafe comes in three parts, the first of which is a management tool, which a webmaster uses to tag whichever files should be protected. When a user requests a web page, PixSafe server side software encrypts the tagged pictures before they get to the end client. At the client side a browser plug-in decodes the picture and disables the Copy, Print, and Save As functions, as well as third party screen grab technologies. If the plug-in is not present, the system uses SmartUpdate to download the 250k app, with the userÆs authorization. With Internet Explorer, the plug-in operates as an ActiveX control.
At a conference last week, cSafe said it would sell the product to internet service providers and large corporations. ISPs could offer the PixSafe protection to their customers for a fee. The price of $10,000 per server license and a share of transaction revenue, should the user wish to sell copyrighted pictures online, is a far cry from the $300 to $1000 tag touted just two months ago, and indicative of how paranoid companies are getting about online copyright protection. The system, marketed as æLook But DonÆt TouchÆ technology will become available in August.
