Digital Rights Management (DRM)
Digital Rights Management (DRM) covers a variety of technologies
that are employed in
the control of access rights to information and various media
such as e-books, music, movies, software and digital
documents.
By controlling access rights (the rights of a user to access
and
view or utilize the media), sharing of the media can be
controlled to regulate licensing and unauthorized
redistribution. Such control can be applied for the purpose
protecting copyright or intellectual property, commercial or
military security and compliance to privacy regulations.
DRM solutions typically consist of
security measures and are applied according to authorized group level
governed by database records that determine the correct policy
to apply to each file and individual user. The security
mechanizations and rights database records are typically
protected by a cryptographic layer that is usually comprised of the
most secure encryption methods of the day.
The use of DRM has been controversial. While its users argue that it is necessary for copyright holders to protect their livelihood, the public who generally wants everything for free, opposes anything that gets in the way and strongly supports such opponents as the Free Software Foundation. Unfortunately, this is mostly comprised of people who have never had an original thought and depend on an employer or others’ ideas for their living.
Because DRM is designed to prevent plagiarism, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation and other opponents that are incapable of
creating new ideas and innovation, conveniently consider DRM
systems to be anti-competitive practices. Just who and what resources are behind the cracks can be mind
boggling when one hears the irony that Microsoft recently awarded a
Russian software developer with a gold partner shield -- when
their most recent achievement was the development of software
that cracks PDF password protection.
As a consequence of the all-in war against
protecting one's livelihood, all widely-used DRM systems have been
targeted and most have been circumvented. Millions of dollars
has gone into the research and development of restricting the
copying of audio-visual media but without proprietary
equipment to record and play the media, nothing can be 100%
secure.
Digital documents in their normal format can be easily copied
and exported from the workplace, both physically and
electronically. Printed documents
can be kept secure if they can be kept away from photocopiers
and the original can be secured at all times. But most
documents today are in digital format and fewer get converted
to paper, making it more difficult to secure them.
Encryption can secure a document while in transit, but once the
password has been given out or when the document is decrypted, the
contents are no longer secure and can then be copied and redistributed
without permission.
The DRM Solution
A typical
example of how DRM further enhances the security of an encrypted
document can be best explained by describing the process used
when accessing a CopySafe PDF document when DRM has been
applied.
When DRM is applied to CopySafe PDF documents, they cannot
shared or accessed by unauthorized users.
Each document can be encrypted with unique
requirements that other readers cannot influence. The
DRM solution used for CopySafe identifies
each user by their unique
Computer ID
to enable access to those approved by the
document author, and according to the
privileges allowed such as print, number of copies that can be printed, how many times the document can be opened, date after which the document will expire, and so on.
So, while copies can still be distributed, if DRM has been
applied to the document, then it can be most secure because the
end recipient will not have permission to access the document.
They will not even be able to open it! The only person who can
open that document will be the intended one.
Portability and Support
A common misunderstanding is that any document can be converted to DRM. Why this can never be true is that any document in its natural file format cannot be protected, even if it is viewable in its natural viewer (ie: Word for .doc, Excel for .xls, etc). The document needs to have policy added and then needs to be encrypted to ensure that the policy remains intact. So for each and every document type, one needs to use a custom viewer (ie, .doc files cannot be opened in Adobe Reader).
Of course it would be much more convenient
to have a single document reader and that is
possible if all types of documents can first
be converted to a common format. Most file
types including images, HTML, PowerPoint,
Excel and Word can easily be converted to
PDF format.
ArtistScope Revolutionized DRM
When ArtistScope first looked into providing DRM for CopySafe PDF documents we found that all other DRM providers were distributing token files with their media that could be easily exploited. Needless to say the rumors that DRM could be
easily be removed was true, especially with some media being protected by a password wrapper only.
By then we were already using call-to-home validation of license
protection for our software, so using our registration server to
manage access rights permissions for documents was very doable
for us.
Our DRM portal for PDF documents was the first of its kind and
revolutionized DRM because it could not be exploited in any way.
In fact it extended an authors control over their documents by
enabling tem to change subscriber and document permissions with
immediate effect, even on documents still out in the wild on CD
or already saved to a user's computer.
To properly prevent sharing we wanted to lock those access
rights to a single computer. But the methods commonly used for
computer identification was by network (MAC) address or IP
address. Again, we found these methods unsuitable because a MAC address was
associated with the user's Internet connection rather than
the computer and they differed with each type of Internet
connections such as LAN, WiFi, etc. The same problem applies
with using IP address because they also change with each type of
Internet connection and IP numbers are commonly assigned at
random by Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
For our computer
identification we needed something more stable
and consistent, so we developed the means of retrieving the
manufacturer's name and serial number of the hard drive where
our software was installed. Again, another revolutionary concept
and that has been our story since 1998... we develop and
innovate while others plagiarize our developments and
terminology.
ArtistScope DRM Software
Some ArtistScope solutions include DRM while others have allowed for the DRM provided by
Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress, Moodle,
Drupal, Joomla and DNN.
- ArtistScope Portable Media - includes DRM for offline viewing of mixed media.
- CopySafe PDF - includes DRM for desktop reading of PDF documents.
- CopySafe Video - includes DRM for desktop viewing of video
Other solutions such as CopySafe Web and the ArtistScope Site Protection System (ASPS) do not include DRM as they are usually used with CMS (as above) which already have sophisticated membership systems. However any website can be easily modified to use DRM by adding some extra code to login and member pages to use the ArtisBrowser. Unlike popular web browsers, the ArtisBrowser is specially designed to protect website data and media (rather than exploit it) and it can identify each computer by a unique signature based on their hard drive manufacturer and serial number. This signature (Computer ID) can then be passed as a server variable to your web site scripts to validate user access.
How To Add DRM To Any Website
Adding DRM to any website is easy. For those with HTML and/or coding ability it can be as simple as adding a couple of lines of code to any web pages that you want to DRM protect. For WordPress and Moodle websites we provide a ready made plugin that will inject the needed code into any web pages that you nominate in the plugin's settings page.Click for more information about Adding DRM To Your Website.
