The founder of
copy protection for the Internet
ArtistScope is an artist-oriented company founded in 1997
specifically to address the need for solutions that could be
employed by artists and photographers to protect their
livelihood online. At a time when nothing was available at all
for the protection for artworks beyond download, ArtistScope
sought a solution despite everyone including the technologists
saying that it was impossible.
The very first solution stumbled upon in our research was
quite simple but very effective. By overlaying a clear image
over the top of the image it was protected from click and save
as. It had shortcomings because it was at a time when overlays
were supported by 70% of web browsers but anyone with an older
browser saw exploded pages. Shortly afterwards Internet
Explorer was upgraded to enable users to download images and
pages with a single click.
The next solution provide provided link protection to prevent
unauthorised linking and bandwidth theft.
Then we discovered that a Java applet could display an image
that couldn't be mouse saved or copied using the page save as
command. But the image was still exposed to direct linking and
retrieval from the browser cache, so ArtistScope developed
image encryption using an algorithm of the domain name as the
password (domain lock).
This was back in 1998 when very few knew about Printscreen
(less than 10% of web developers). But image protection was
new and so became the sport of spreading the word online
forums about how to steal images. Printscreen was the topic
shortly followed by a flood of screen capture programs based
on technology that Microsoft was publishing for free.
Then ArtistScope developed a plugin to prevent Printscreen and
screen capture at system level.
Digital Rights Management
DRM is one of the few terms used in the copy protection
industry that was not invented by ArtistScope. DRM came from
the wordsmiths employed by the multi-million dollar start ups
who emerged following ArtistScope developments. Funded by stock
market investors, their fate was short lived because despite
all the hype that they created, "copy protection" is not a
billion dollar industry at all. There were very few who could afford
the inflexibility and inherent limitations of their solutions
which were extremely expensive and required dedicated
servers. But perhaps their
greatest failing was the inability to maintain that each
client and end user was kept abreast of the constant changes
in Internet environment. Without updates you eventually have a
lack of security and a lot of unhappy clients.
ArtistScope has more than 10 years of experience in the
industry of copy protection (longer than the industry's
lifetime) and our solutions are not just
imitations. Our solutions are most portable, variable,
affordable and easy to use. ArtistScope DRM offers total
control of documents even after distribution... and is more
secure than ever imagined.
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