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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.

Access rights in the officeBy 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 to protect their livelihood, the public generally wants everything for free, opposing anything that gets in their way and will strongly support opponents like the Free Software Foundation, a group mostly comprised of people who have never had an original thought and depend on an employer or ideas of others for their living.

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.

The DRM Solution

While many consider DRM to be a form of copy protection, it does not actually prevent copy once the media is on display. What DRM really does, is prevent unauthorised access before media can be displayed. In that sense DRM can be used on its own to ensure that only authorised users have access. But it is best used with copy protection so that once on display, that media cannot be copied in any way for redistribution.

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 DRM

ArtistScope revolutionised DRM by introducing call-to-home validation. All other DRM providers were distributing token files with their media that could be easily exploited. Needless to say DRM got a bad reputation, especially with some being protected by a password wrapper only.

The CopySafe DRM portal for PDF documents was the first of its kind and revolutionized DRM because it could not be exploited in any way. It extended control over documents by enabling authors to change subscriber and document permissions with immediate effect, even on documents still out in the wild on CD/USB or already saved to a user's computer.

To properly prevent sharing, access rights need to be locked to an approved computer/device. But while identification by network (MAC) address or IP address can be used, it is useless when offline and changes depending on connection type. Also, IP adresses can change every time a user reconnects. So for computer identification ArtistScope solutions use an algorithm comprised of hard drive manufacturer and serial number.

DRM Software & Services

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.

Other solutions like the ArtistScope Site Protection System (ASPS) does provide the most secure copy protection for all web page content but it does not include DRM to avoid conflicts with existing membership systems like those used in CMS like WordPress.

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. See the list of plugins for WordPress and other CMS.


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