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DRM - DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT
What is DRM - Digital Rights Management?
DRM, also known as digital rights management, is a term that is used to describe the processes by which the author or publisher of a work exerts his rights to control what the purchaser of his work is entitled to do.
DRM represents the controls by which you can prevent someone from copying or printing or editing or otherwise making available your privileged information to other people.
Traditionally, in the print industry, the author (or publisher) of a book asserted their right to be able to control what the purchaser could (or could not) do when they had purchased the work.
DRM is an approach that lets authors and publishers exert more appropriate rights over digital (or dematerialized) than they were able to in the physical print era.
What one has to remember is that the balance of power has changed in the last ten or so years. Prior to that, copying and re-printing a physical book was non-trivial. If you wanted to steal someone else’s work you needed to find someone who was willing to publish the copy, and the publisher knew they would be sued without mercy. So there were some really obvious physical controls in the physical print industry.
But the digital age has spawned the ability – the computer – to make copies at near zero cost, and to do so without detection. So the rules of the ancient world do not apply. The use of web sites to facilitate pirated film, music and PDF documents demonstrates that the ability to copy works that do not have digital rights management applied to them is unlimited and files can be shared and transmitted without any control at all.
So digital rights management is a critical feature if you are making confidential information available to others, whether it is a price list, a contract specification, an analyst’s report, a newsletter or a book. Without DRM you have no way of preventing people who have access to your intellectual property from doing just exactly what they want with it. So that’s why it is important.
Further reading on Digital Rights Management
To learn more about digital rights management, please take a look at the following white papers.
 Introduction to Digital Rights Management - DRM
Protecting your Intellectual Property with DRM
Download DRM SoftwareDownload DRM software for PDF documents, web pages, images, flash and elearning courses. PDF, document, web content, and software security that uses DRM controls to protect your intellectual property.
DRM guide to digital rights management - covering drm, drm security, digital rights management software | |
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