An essence of Digital Rights Management

As most of us know that in this present age of information technology digital management of rights which is sometimes referred as Digital Rights Management (DRM) is seen as one of the greatest challenges globally for the content communities. The basic traditional rights management of the physical materials which gets benefited from the material's physicality provides some barrier to the unauthorized exploitation of the content. However, today we see many serious breaches in copyright law all because of the ease of copping and transmitting the digital files.

In the past, the Digital Rights Management focused on encryption and security as a one of the means to solve the numerous issues of unauthorized copying, to put it short, to lock the content there by limiting its distribution of it to only those who pay for the content. This was the first-generation of Digital Rights Management; it was helpful but still it represented a very substantial narrowing of the real and greater broader capabilities of DRM. Then it was the second-generation of DRM which covered the identification, protection, description, trading, monitoring and tracking of the variety of all forms of rights usages over the both tangible and intangible assets which also included management of the relationships with the rights holders. This was very advantageous when it came to protecting the rights especially in the Protect Documents domain. A note here, that DRM is the "digital management of rights" and not the famously misleading term "management of digital rights". Which also implies that, Digital Rights Management manages all the included rights, which not only contains those which are applicable to the permissions over digital content but everything related to those.

We need to consider two critical architectures when it comes to designing and implementing the DRM systems. The first one is the Functional Architecture, which covers the high-level modules or components of the DRM system which when combined provides a perfect end-to-end management of rights. Second among these is the critical architecture which is the Information Architecture, which covers the modeling of the entities within the DRM system along with the related relationships. (We also have other architectural layers which could be considered, such as the Module, Execution, Conceptual, and Code layers)

The general reproduction and usage of software have been sporadically used since 1970s in regards to the technical controls, the term 'DRM' has meant primarily the usage of these measures so as to gain the control of artistic or literary content. With the great advent of DRM technologies these have been greatly enabled publishers to enforce strict access policies which would not only help them disallow copyright infringements, but also would prevent lawful fair use of copyrighted works, this would mean implementing the use of constraints on non-copyrighted works that are meant for distribution which is nothing but simply mean to protect documents of very high value digitally. Some samples include the placement of DRM on certain public-domain or open-licensed e-books, or Digital Rights Management to be included in the consumer electronic devices that would mean to time-shift both the copyrighted and non-commercial works.

Most would know that the most used industry for Digital Rights Management is that of the entertainment industry (examples are film and recording). We can find many online music stores like those of, Apple Inc.'s iTunes Store, as well as other e-book publishers, who are imposing Digital Rights Management on its services, which is helping its industry to protect & safeguard the documents and the related files.

There are many such document viewing technologies which would cater to the needs to the DRM, one such is the Adeptol Document Viewer which is considered to be one of the best with its very large extensive applications. You can protect documents of various nature be it those of AutoCAD Viewer, Dicome Viewer, Tiff Viewer or the generic PDF Viewer.

Article By Adeptol