Digital Rights Management DRM Security – A Short Excerpt

Digital Rights Management DRM draws its essence from intellectual property rights (IPR) or copyrights whereby there are laws that see to it that copyright owners are paid for the use of their creative works such as films, pictures, music, plays, books and so forth. DRM in relation to IPR is therefore about the measures that are taken by a copyright owner to ensure that his/her creative is not abused to the effect that he/she will not receive his/her due royalties. DRM security is therefore all about protecting any intellectual property that is held and processed by computers or indeed anything else that can process CD-ROM, DVD, VCR, cassette tapes, flashcards and so forth.

Digital Rights Management DRM in relation to IT controls seeks to provide fine-grained controls with regards to reading a copyrighted item (how many times, start and end dates for reading), printing (if allowed, number of copies, poor quality copies to discourage copying), altering (changing the content, removing copyright marks), copying (making copies, copying certain portions, taking screenshots), and running the item as a program (run on one computer, only one user to run it, number of PCs the item can use). DRM security systems use cryptography to enforce these controls which are transparent to the user, and cannot be modified.