Beginners guide to Active Rights Management & DRM
What is Active Rights Management?
Active rights management is a peculiar term that seems to have been invented for control systems that allow a rights owner to exert control over information immediately.
Some PR departments of active rights management product suppliers would like to claim that active rights management allows you to:
- Control who can see information and whether they can print, copy, or select text
- Prevent information from being forwarded
- Recall or expire information, even after it’s accessed
- Track what recipients do with your information (for example, read, print) after they download it.
Now it is extremely difficult to tell the difference between active rights management and digital rights management, and it is beyond the scope of this article to try to do so. Perhaps the most intellectually challenging claim that active rights management suppliers are making is to recall information after it has been accessed.
Now if the user has sat in front of the screen and used a digital camera to record what appears on the screen (take a photo), or used a screen ripper / screen grabber (a program that inspects and can copy the video display memory) then it seems illogical in the extreme that access can be expired because it has already taken place.
But, ignoring this, active rights management has some important concepts, abut being able to vary user rights in realtime, or, more correctly, whenever users have to verify their credentials and authorities. And this is a highly important point.
If you want to be able to alter the rights of a user, you cannot do this unless the user is obliged to verify their rights every time they want to use any document to which they think or believe they have access rights.
In many instances active rights management does not make any sense at all.
If you sell eBooks then once you have sold a book you have no claim to be able to change the rights of the purchaser. In fact, if you tried to do so you would be acting unlawfully, and would expose yourself to litigation that would likely bankrupt you.
So active rights management is not a valid approach method to controlling all instances of PDF security or digital rights management.
The fact is that the world is much bigger than the active rights management concept, as it has been publicly proposed, allows for. Active rights management is simply not a useful operating concept for rights management because it is flawed in terms of its breadth. Active rights management may have some value when it comes to corporate internal control systems. But it is very difficult indeed to see why active rights management has any importance compared with existing controls such as access control (mandatory or discretionary) which appear to provide all the requirements that active rights management claims to support.
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