Here is some documentation found by Google:
Trymedia's core product, ActiveMark, can work with any form of content, but
the company is focusing on the video games and software because media
companies "still don't get it," Zichermann said. "God bless 'em."
Zichermann says games has been pirated at the rate of 30% since day one. "It
could be media companies have had better luck in the past protecting
content," Zichermann said. Those days are over now, he says, and media
companies have to try just as hard to protect content as any game developer.
There's no silver bullet, he says. Content owners can't expect to apply DRM
like a magic salve and protect content without making changes in the way
they do business. "There's no perfect security system," Zichermann said,
except maybe "Fort Knox." But there isn't enough gold in Fort Knox to make a
heist worth the trouble, he said. Sometimes, cracking copy protection just
isn't worth the effort either. It might be easier to just buy it, which is
the core of Trymedia's philosophy.
Zichermann says to think of the normal reaction of someone who, after going
to the trouble of ripping off and installing software, finds it's
copy-protected and simply won't work? He says most people "go download the
crack," hacker jargon for bypassing the copy protection code.
Zichermann says it's basic economics. After spending time pirating and
installing software, the cost of buying a legal version, if the stolen
version won't work, becomes prohibitive. An investment has been made, and
the natural thing is to protect that investment by making another marginal
investment by procuring a crack, rather than scrapping the whole effort,
buying the product online and re-installing it.
ActiveMark works by walling off certain software features and functions. The
rest of the program can be used, so users get a taste of it. As they learn
it, they are basically investing more resources in it. Then, suddenly, they
hit the wall. They've reached the protected part and have to register it to
go on.
Registration is done through an ASP-style portal that Trymedia will operate
or content owners can run themselves. Trymedia's slice of the portal runs on
any Unix platform and uses simple CGI and XML calls to communicate with the
rest of the customer's portal. Once the user registers the software, he can
continue using it where he left off. If he makes a copy for a friend, it
reverts to the unregistered state, so the friend can use it for a while
before hitting the same protected area.
Zichermann claims the system would work for music and video content owners.
ActiveMark could protect digital media by letting consumers play a sample of
a file, but if they want to play the whole thing they'll have to register
it.
P2P software developer Streamcast Networks is developing a similar system
for its P2P client Morpheus. It's targeted at digital content, but it
remains to be seen if Streamcast gets any takers among the big labels. It
has inked a few deals with independent artists.
Trymedia charges content owners $1,000 a file to make their software
ActiveMark-ready, a process Zichermann says doesn't require any code
modifications. For some applications the cost can add up, but Zichermann
says 85% of Trymedia's customers use an automated utility to do the
encrypting, which saves them money. Trymedia also levies a per-transaction
fee, ranging from 0.75% to 7%.
The company claims over three million ActiveMark-protected video games have
been downloaded so far on P2P networks, such as FastTrack and Gnutella.
Trymedia has game developers Infogrames, eBrainy, Nine Dragons, Digital
Fusion, Fasttrak and ExelWeiss as customers. Infogrames is one of the
largest of the game publishers and a Trymedia customer for about a year.
It appears that the answere to your question is "Buy It!"
