Piracy costs the makers of "the Da Vinci Code," "Spider-Man" and other movie franchises $1.25 million a day. Combating digital pirates, for Sony's director of enterprise architecture services Heidi Kujawa, means more than keeping bootleggers out of the theaters: It's about safely managing Sony's intellectual property, and how it's exchanged inside and outside Sony.
How does your group help Sony combat piracy? We try to stay in lockstep with piracy trends, and understand how people are getting to our assets--for example, sneaking into theaters with cameras. There are also forensic initiatives we're looking at, such as digitally watermarking assets so things cannot be copied, and, if they are, figuring out how they're doing it. We've also built audit tools within our content management system to see who is distributing what to whom and when.
For Sony, is piracy best combated with policy or technology? With piracy, the speculation is always that company information is more likely to be leaked from an internal source than from an external one. That problem is addressed with policy. But because technology has progressed so much in 10 years--the capabilities of small devices, having clear cell phone pictures, the ability to rip streaming video off a site--there's no linkage back to who is doing it. This has to be addressed with technology.
What were the main drivers that necessitated a content management system? It was built around the
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Michael S. Mimoso, Editorial Director
premise of efficiency, security and cost savings. Look at some of the ways we fulfill our contractual obligations with distributors or the channel. Part of the deal is that we need to get them a video or an asset like subtitles or music cues. A lot of it was physically shipped around world. Our system digitizes our assets, so we save money on physical shipping costs. The ability to audit who sent what, when and where is important too.
Was security the No. 1 priority over efficiency and cost savings? Security came into the conversation right out of the gate. Putting one of Sony's assets into an envelope and shipping it across world--how many hands touch it, lose it or copy it? Sony holds its intellectual property close to its heart.
Read the full version of this interview at searchsecurity.com/ismag.
This was first published in August 2006