What Is Digital Rights Management?

By Author: AdamsSmith
Total Articles: 16
Comment this article

Digital rights management is a extensive term that refers to any scheme that controls access to copyrighted material using technological means. In essence, the usage control from the person in possession of digital content is removed through Digital Rights Management and is put in the hands of a computer program. The methods and applications are endless which are impacting today's digital world. Few examples where digital rights management is used:

A music label releases titles on a type of CD that includes bits of information intended to confuse ripping software.

A company sets its servers to block the forwarding of sensitive and confidential e-mails.

A movie studio includes software on their DVDs that limits the number of copies a user can make to two.

An e-book server restricts access to, copying of and printing of material based on constraints set by the copyright holder of the content.

While many consumers perceive Digital Rights Management methods as overly limiting, especially those methods employed by the movie and music industries but ...
... whereas digital rights management is nonetheless trying to solve a legitimate problem. The distribution of digital content over the Internet via the noted file sharing networks has made traditional copyright law obsolete in practice. When ever someone downloads an MP3 file of a copyrighted song from the many available free file-sharing network instead of buying the CD, the audio label that owns the copyright and the artist who created the song are loosing money. Research tells us that in the case of the movie industry, revenue losses from this sort of infringement distribution of DVD content is at around $5 billion a year. The nature of the Internet makes it impractical to try to sue every person who breaks the law in this way, so companies are trying to regain control of distribution by making it technologically impossible for consumers to make digital copies. So here Digital Rights Management comes to the aid.

DRM History

DRM is not a new thing, many of those old floppy disks were copy-protected. Manufacturers wrote them using special drives that a typical consumer drive couldn't copy. Some required that a piece of hardware be connected to an I/O port on the computer for the software to execute.

The problem is that when you buy a DVD, it's perfectly legally accepted thing that you can make a copy of it for your own use. This is the brief of the fair use doctrine in copyright law, there are many other situations that negate copyright protection in favor of the content user, including copying protected material for personal use and copying anything in the public domain for any use. Most Digital Rights Management schemes cannot take fair use into account, because a computer program cannot make subjective decisions.

Digital Rights Management is aiding many industries, but you may not be aware of the impact its making on other unheard industries in this field like the medical field, navigation, and others. Here in medical field the technology has a greater impact on the lives of the people the more easy the technology, the more effective is the medical approach, here this industry uses DICOM Viewer to look at the various scanned reports or other medical related documents. DICOM Viewer is a boon in disguise for the radiologists who need to diagnose some very serious analysis. Here DRM protects the dicom viewer documents and files to be infringed. In the navigation field AUTOCAD Viewer is helping the industry for a better and easy access to reach for places. AUTOCAD Viewer is helping design for better technology in order to better our exsiting Digital communication in more efecient way. Even in this field lot many by passes are being stopped with the help of DRM.

Ultimately Digital Rights Management is helping out world to Protect Documents which are critical and important from being bypassed. We can Protect Documents which are to be with the help of DRM.

Author Bio:

Adams Smith is an occasional writer on technological upfronts. He is a writer who likes to educate people on technological developments. He has many years of experience in article writing and his reviews are well respected in the industry.For more information please visit:http://www.ajaxdocumentviewer.com/