| Digital
Rights Management
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INTRODUCTION
During
the past decade, computers and the Internet have transformed the way we work,
learn, communicate and are entertained. Yet some of technology's potential to
do even more has not been fully realized, because of concerns about illegal use
of digital information, about confidentiality and about privacy. For example,
e-commerce in music and movies has been slowed, because artists and publishers
have been concerned about protecting their copyrighted works from illegal use.
More broadly, businesses don't exchange digital information with customers and
partners as freely as they might, because they fear it could fall into the wrong
hands. These concerns
reflect the increasing need of all businesses and many individual computer users
to share a wide range of digital information, yet still control who can use it
and how -and it is called "rights management."Digital Rights Management
(DRM) is a technology that protects content owners' rights while selling and distributing
the content online in a digital form. DRM introduces new possibilities for selling,
distributing and consuming content and therefore does not only involve the prevention
of piracy. Traditional
rights management of physical materials benefited from the materials' physicality
as this provided some barrier to unauthorized exploitation of content. However,
today we already see serious breaches of copyright law because of the ease with
which digital files can be copied and transmitted. On the Internet, DRM technology
is currently used mostly for music, videos, and books. The end-user's terminal
is a personal computer or a portable music player that can download DRM protected
music from a PC. While there is no industry standard for DRM, IBM, Microsoft and
RealNetworks have each introduced their own proprietary software platforms.
Previously, Digital
Rights Management (DRM) focused on security and encryption as a means of solving
the issue of unauthorized copying, that is, lock the content and limit its distribution
to only those who pay. This was the first-generation of DRM, and it represented
a substantial narrowing of the real and broader apabilities of DRM. The second-generation
of DRM covers the description, identification, trading, protection, monitoring
and tracking of all forms of rights usages over both tangible and intangible assets
including management of rights holders relationships. DRM limits what a user can
do with that content even when he has possession of it. Rights
management refers to technologies that protect digital content after it is shared
or distributed. Specifically, rights management technologies enable a content
owner to stipulate a set of rules, or policy rights, that govern how the content
may be used, by whom, for how long, etc. The protection, achieved by encrypting
the content, may be provided by software or embedded in the hardware device itself
- or some combination of the two. Protection needs to be easy to update, to address
inevitable system breaches. Digital
Rights Management Digital
rights management (DRM) is a systematic approach to copyright protection for digital
media. DRM's purpose is to prevent illegal distribution of paid content over the
Internet. DRM products were developed in response to the rapid increase in online
piracy of commercially marketed material, which proliferated through the widespread
use of Napster and other peer-to-peer file exchange programs. DRM products are
available from a number of vendors, including ContentGuard, Digimarc, and InterTrust,
to automate the processes involved. In general, DRM products are turnkey packages
that include everything needed for the operation, such as, for example, server
software and user plug-ins.
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