Peter Levy, CEO of Vyou.com (pronounced view dot-com), wants to give Web publishers complete control over who saves, copies, forwards, and even prints their Web pages. Thanks to his company's Vyoufirst software, site owners can now fully protect their intellectual property by establishing "content access policies" for static or streaming media. Software, it turns out, isn't as easily broken as the law.

What's a content access policy? It's a set of rules that determines how online content may be used, effectively lobotomizing computers to the level of televisions. In other words, site owners using Vyoufirst can turn off the ability to print, copy, paste, or save a Web page or any of the images on it, and even deny the ability to view the source code of Web pages or take a screenshot.

Because the Vyoufirst system is Web-centric (as opposed to the file-centric systems used to protect high-value digital content like Stephen King's Riding the Bullet e-book), the adoption of the technology could herald a radical change in what's freely available on the Web.

End of Days

"I think it could be the end of the wild, wooly Web," says Bonnie Brooks, an analyst with Creative Strategies. Brooks sees Vyoufirst as a natural fit for the education market, where content security is a real need. "Professors do not want to put their stuff online because it gets stolen," she explains.

Nothing would make Internet (and intranet) content providers happier than reliable intellectual property protection. By all accounts, piracy is rampant—the International Intellectual Property Association estimates losses due to piracy in 1999 at $8.669 billion worldwide. While figures that apply specifically to online piracy remain largely anecdotal, few dispute the severity of the problem.

Hoping to provide some relief, a handful of companies are scrambling to bring copyright enforcement schemes like digital rights management (DRM) and integrated document management (IDM) to market. Among them: Adobe, Aliroo, Authentica, En trust, Inter Trust, Marim ba, Pitney Bowes, Reciprocal, Tumbleweed, UPS, and Xerox.

Victim's Revenge

Vyou.com's Levy knows only too well the need for online content protection: He says his former company had its intellectual property stolen. "This company started because I personally had the problem that our solutions now solve," he says. "I was the founder and CEO of a company called IntelliChoice, 'which' provides free analyses of current car leases on its Web site. But the problem was that a competitor was stealing these proprietary analyses every day and putting them up on another site. There was nothing we could do about it except sue them. We forced them to stop but it took us three or four months, several letters, and a lot of money, sweat, and time. It left me thinking, 'Why in the world is my only answer to this problem suing these people?' "

Beyond reducing piracy and the costly lawsuits and losses that go with it, he sees Vyoufirst as a way for companies to protect their brand identities—a company's content access policy could prevent visitors from saving a trademarked logo to a local disk—and perhaps more importantly as a way to build traffic by denying site visitors the ability to e-mail purloined content to friends and colleagues. When people do this, he explains, "They never actually go to the site, so they don't get counted as traffic. They don't see advertising. They don't have a chance to generate any revenue."

Levy also believes that his company's system, by providing security, will lead to the availability of higher-quality Web content and that consumers will benefit by being able to "try before they buy." So rather than seeing a thumbnail of a digital image for sale, a prospective buyer could see the full picture because the file would be protected.

Stevan Vigneaux, vice president of marketing for Authentica (www .authentica.com), concurs. Authentica's DRM software differs from Vyou.com's in that it dynamically and persistently protects Web content, files, and e-mail. "This is going to open up some fundamentally new business opportunities, including renting information," he says. "With our software, I can literally allow you to look at something for an hour, then get it back and you can never look at it again."

Everyone in Chains

Intellectual property protection may be the killer app for content owners. But will it cause resentment among consumers unaccustomed to surfing in handcuffs? "I think it will," says Malcolm Maclachlan, a consumer e-commerce analyst with IDC. "But if 'companies' can make it convenient enough and make consumers understand why these things are done, certainly that will help."

Among those likely to be least understanding: hackers. Levy expects someone to eventually crack the code that protects Vyoufirst content. "A determined, sophisticated person, given enough time and resources, can get around anything," he says.

Is this the end of the open Web? "I don't think people will really accept that," opines Maclachlan. "How do you popularize the free content that's going on? You make everything else a real pain to use. I don't think people are going to be able to get away with making things too closed."

However, on an indiscreetly placed whiteboard in the Vyou.com office, there's a long list of major companies that will soon announce their plans to implement Vyoufirst content protection. The Web may not be under complete lockdown by the end of the year, but it's certainly going to be a very different place.