Several years ago I researched and worked on this concept in my spare time in the hope of creating an alternative to DRM and an alternative revenue model. Inste

Several years ago I researched and worked on this concept in my spare time in the hope of creating an alternative to DRM and an alternative revenue model. Instead of forcing users to use authorized devices and checking if they are allowed to consume the content I wanted to encourage users to desire authentic digital content. This would have involved a container capable of holding chains of signatures, PKI, and players with a feature similar to the padlock in browsers. Authentic for pay content would have contained unique signatures that acted as a watermark. If someone ilegally shared the signed version it could be traced back and action could be targeted. The goal was not to make it impossible to pirate content (I find it foolish to try to prevent this) but to make unsigned content undesirable due to uncertain authenticity. The same way authentic colectables are desirable due to their authenticity. A forgery of a famous painting is worth a lot less than the original if you know it is fake even if it is a perfect copy. A reissue of a first edition comic book is worth less even if the content is the same. In some markets 3C marketing works better than 4P marketing and this results in a circular symbiotic relationship between creator and consumer rather than a hierarchical antagonic relationship. This also included a way of remixing content that allowed distribution of the original along with the alterations. A sort of open source for media. Think of distributing your Blender/Premiere/ After Effects/etc. project file instead of the rendered result. It would have also been possible to share the alterations without the original and let the user provide their own copy if the original. This was based on a very wrong understanding of what is a derivative from a legal pov. Alas, this was a foolish dream in my youth, but it was a vision of what media formats would have been like in a parallel world where authenticity was worth more than monopoly over distribution. A world where plagiarism would have been a bigger crime instead of copyright infringement.