Hoping to develop the industry standard for securing text online, Adobe Systems said on Tuesday it would integrate its technology with InterTrust, a digital rights management company. They will work together to provide an offering for publishers that allows more security and complexity.
InterTrust's technology enables publishers to charge customers for a subscription-based newsletter and to offer other purchases within the letter, such as obtaining data used to produce a graph, according to Joseph Jennings, senior vice president of marketing.
"The reason people want to work with us is to sell more people more stuff," he said bluntly. The technology would also allow publishers to determine how customers use the content: how many downloads, for example, or whether to allow customers to rent or rent-to-own, or whether they could send it to friends or even print out.
InterTrust is currently in a pilot test with some big publishers, but Jennings said he could not disclose any more details, citing the company's quiet period before its IPO.
InterTrust has also pitched its technology to the recording industry for securing music online, and is working with Universal, one of the big five labels, to put copy protection on songs. It is also incorporating its technology into digital audio player from companies such as Diamond Multimedia and Sonique. Sonique is owned by Lycos, the parent company of Wired News.
Last month, Adobe announced its PDF Merchant software package that publishers can use to encrypt written material and sell it online. Publishers like Barnes & Noble, and Simon & Schuster are testing the software, and could eventually use it to sell things like single columns from back issues of magazines for prices as low as a quarter.
Adobe also said it partnered with Fatbrain.com, an online bookseller that plans to become a hub site for selling digital downloads. Web publisher Fatbrain will encrypt both Adobe PDF and Microsoft Word files for customers to download and read or print out.
Xerox has been working on competing technology.
