Information Rights Management

By Author: Vicky Milza
Total Articles: 13
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In discussing digital media, be it eBooks, music, films, videos etc, there is always the question about protecting IPR with information rights management. Now, this is a wide topic but it has been segmented into three parts i.e. Digital rights management, Active rights management and Enterprise rights management. With the fast pace at which information technology is growing, digital media owners can no longer be ignorant of information rights management as the internet is rife with fraudsters who have no problem infringing on your intellectual property rights.

In information rights management, we are deliberating that the owner of particular digital works has the right to define, through a licence, the rights that are granted to the purchaser of the said works. These rights more often than not relate to the terms of personal use, ability to forward the works to others, ability to extract, copy or edit, and a defined period of use of the said works.

Digital information rights management (DRM) deals with the steps taken by a publisher or author of a work to assert his/her rights, which in turn regulate what a purchaser ...
... can do with such works. This normally deals with the control measures that prevent one from copying, editing or printing and or otherwise redistributing your works to other unauthorised people. Digital rights management is particularly useful in addressing piracy and intellectual property theft especially when you are releasing confidential information to other parties. Without this sort of information rights management there is no way of controlling what people can do with your intellectual property.

It is quite difficult to differentiate active rights management from the digital rights but the term active more often than not will refer to the information rights management controls that an owner can exercise over his/her information in real time. This is effective when the user needs to login to your site for verification that he/she is an authorised user of your works. This form of information rights management at times does not make sense; in instances where you have sold an eBook, you should not be able to change the rights of the buyer and doing so will actually lead to litigation. Active rights management is therefore not commonly used for digital media security but forms a major part in document collaboration systems.

Enterprise rights management is more related to controls that are applied within an organisation and only have an effect internally. Most of the controls here are similar to those in DRM i.e. controlling printing, saving or editing but some information rights management controls can also hinder copying and forwarding. As enterprise rights are enforced only in-house, they are usually issued by the network administrator and are also referred to as Discretionary Access Controls.

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