An award-winning Internet Explorer plugin that communicates with content licensing services using SOAP.

The Client

Their Challenge

iCopyright's Instant Clearance Service was designed to offer articles for purchase and download to individuals — but large companies normally purchase enterprise-level site licenses directly from a publisher. In order to gain access to this huge market, iCopyright conceived of a web browser toolbar button that would change color if a user was reading an article covered by his or her employer's site license. To bring that vision to life, they turned to Ideograph LLC.

Our Solution

Ideograph engineers designed, implemented, and released a Windows IE plugin written in C++. Upon recognizing any of several licensing tags in the HTML page being shown to the user, the plugin communicates with the iCopyright data center using SOAP to decide if the content is covered by the user's site license, can be purchased using iCopyright's existing web service, or if other options are available to the user — and on what servers those services are offered. The toolbar button changes color as the user surfs to different articles, and as site licensing deals are struck or expire. Updated configuration information is automatically propogated to extant plugins. A suite of back-end web tools for publishers and salespeople round out the solution. Finally, Ideograph developers helped write the patent application (currently pending), and took part in sales calls and training sessions.

The service won the Software & Information Industry Association's prestigous Codie Award for Best Digital Rights Management Solution in 2005.