The Problem with an Original Idea....

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...is that someone's already thought of it first.

Someone said that to me in my final year of engineering. I had just pitched to him my idea for a final-year project, with conviction only possible when you're still under the legal drinking age, that it was the most brilliant thing since sliced bread. A grizzled veteran of the software industry, he begged to differ. He pointed out a couple of other systems that did something very similar.
I responded with, "It doesn't matter who gets there first, but who makes the most noise about it." Yeah, I was pretty amusing at 20!

Something similar happend to me just now. I've been reading about DRM issues quite a bit lately (for class cases and projects.)
I'd thought to myself that the content owners (and the DRM solution providers) were thinking about it all wrong. A good fix would be to tie digital rights to the user, rather than devices. It's not a perfect fix, but the shame could be a powerful tool (especially if you're viewing stuff in a group.) It would be pretty easy to implement technically as well.

So guess what TechCrunch tells me about?

Streamburst ties the user to the content, by displaying the person's name (whoever bought it) for five seconds before playing the video.


I think the idea can be extended though:

- The obvious extensions (though a little messy again), is to tie this to aunthentication, i.e. have the person "log in" before the content plays.
- The log-in requires connectivity which may not be desirable. In that case, add viewership data (i.e. have something before the clip that says, this clip has been viewed by Tom, Dick, Harry,....) Biometric ids can be used to implement this.

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