What is Digital Rights Management?

If you are an owner of any kind of intellectual property such as novel, poetry, artwork, film or musical composition, your works can be protected under copyright laws. As an owner of the intellectual property, you have rights to control what other people can do with your work. Basically, copyright laws avoid any use of original materials without the consent of authors. Before the digital age, management of copyright materials rather easy, because duplication of original work is a costly process and it easy to track down the unauthorized replication. But with the dawn of the digital era, intellectual properties cannot be protected from traditional methods. Computers and the internet allow to copy and distribute copies of digital intellectual properties almost freely around the world. Therefore, it was compulsory to introduce new strategies to safeguard these properties.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) permits content owners to control how others use their digital intellectual properties. Technologies used in DRM’s prevent the illegal utilization or manipulation of digital contents such as music, movies, games, software, databases, maps, reports etc. Therefore, if you plan to make publicly available your content in digital format, it’s necessary to use the DRM technologies in order to do what you exactly want to do with them. Otherwise, there will be a risk that, unauthorized parties use them for their own purposes. This is important especially if the intellectual property generates revenue from it. For an example, a DRM system used by Netflix prevents downloading the Netflix app from Google Play Store for some users. The reason behind this is, some users tried to download the Netflix app on rooted devices. These rooted devices give administrative rights to the users and eventually, they can gain the complete control of the device. Then, they are able to access the Netflix contents by bypassing the license requirements. Another popular example of DRM usage is iTunes DRM system. Apple developed a DRM system called FairPlay to make sure only authorized Apple devices to play the music sold through iTunes. Not only to protect the copyrights, some companies use DRM technologies for marketing purposes too. Film distributors include advertisements inside the DVDs and restrain viewers from skipping the advertisements before start the movie.

The history of digital rights management goes afar as late 1960’s where IBM had used encryption technology to protect their software. Later, IBM developed a more advanced DRM technology called Cryptolope. In 1983, Ryuichi Moriya, a Japanese engineer, came up with the first modern implementation of DRM known as Software Service System (SSS) and later, he refined it under the name Superdistribution. Since then, different DRM technologies implemented to legitimate the user experience of digital contents and against the growth of piracy.

Why is DRM important?

Imagine, you did a research and published the findings of your work as a research paper on an academic website. If others want to access your content, they need to pay for it. What happens, if someone just downloads a copy of your paper and then distributes for free among other people who interest of your paper. It negatively affects the revenue you expect from publishing it and there’s a risk that, others might try to steal your ideas and republish as their own. As a publisher, what are the legal measures you can take to avoid these types of misconducts? As a basic copyrights protection method, you can watermark your document. Further, once it allows viewing the content to paid users, you can restrict some operations like save, edit or share the document. You also can limit the number of prints and prevent taking screenshots etc. Digital Rights Management can easily enable all these features for you.

DRM ensures the protection of intellectual digital contents in various ways.

• Though a user purchased a digital content, DRM can prohibit users from altering the contents without the permission of the original author. This process would preserve the rights of the original author.
• Security of emails can be ensured with proper DRM protection processes. There are some DRM systems which give control to the senders to stop recipients from forwarding confidential messages to unauthorized parties and also prohibit downloading the content of the email to recipient’s device.
• Filmmakers and distributors use DRM techniques like DVD and Blu-ray Region codes to control the release of films based on regions. By that, content owners can control the content, release date, and price according to the region.
• Digital piracy is all the time major concern among content owners and distributors. DRM technology can be used to encrypt the contents and deliver them only to rightful users.
• Not only for software, DRM can be enforced on hardware too. For an example, HP has long installed a security chip in its cartridges and printers and later, they updated the firmware of their printers. By that, HP made third-party ink cartridges incompatible with HP printers.
  
  

How does the DRM work?

As mentioned above, different types of DRM systems are available and the mechanism of a particular DRM depends on the terms and conditions of the content owner. Whenever you try to access a certain intellectual digital content, there’s a set of terms and conditions you have to agree prior to accessing that content. Once you agree with the terms and conditions, DRM systems will ensure that you access the content according to those conditions. In that manner, when looking over the DRM systems, we can see that these systems operate on three levels. First, defining the terms and conditions for usage of particular copyright content, then managing the distribution of that content and control what end-users can do with that content.

Let’s try to understand the flow of a DRM system using Kotobee, an eBook publisher’s DRM. Kotobee uses the cloud technology for their services. Kotobee’s DRM encrypts the eBooks with encryption keys and stores them on a server. When the user wants to access an eBook, he needs to enter the email and password or a code for authentication. If the authentication was successful, the encryption key would retrieve from the server and decrypt the eBook. This process guarantees that only rightful users get access to the content and also protects the content from editing or copying. This system also allows users to lend eBooks to other people using Kobobee’s limited lending facility.

These are the most widely used DRM tools,

• Microsoft PlayReady
• Google Widevine
• Apple FairPlay
• Adobe Primetime
• Marlin
• CMLA-OMA

Since, as a significant technology, DRM helps to protect the digital contents from illegal usage, still, this technology creates controversies and users argue that some DRM mechanisms are over-restrictive. Though the contents legitimately purchased by users, sometimes they cannot access the content from multiple devices. This challenges the facilities which provide other technologies like cloud computing. Also, some content owners remove the important features like creating backups which can be useful in critical situations, especially when there’s a risk of data loss.  Therefore, DRM architects should focus on designing more user-friendly DRM solutions while maximizing the security features against illegal usage and piracy.