Digital Rights Management

Study Guide

What is Digital Rights Management?

Any arrangement in which the usage of a copyrighted digital work can be restricted by the owner of the rights to the work. These restrictions are determined by the copyright holder. Typically, authorized recipients or users must acquire a license in order to consume the protected material. These can be files, music, movies and any other form of digital work.

Privacy - How to go about implementing these restrictions?

    Traditional rights management of physical materials benefited from the materials' physicality as this provided some barrier to unauthorized exploitation of content. However, today we already see serious breaches of copyright law because of the ease with which digital files can be copied and transmitted. Digital Rights Management began focusing on security and encryption as a means of solving the issue of unauthorized copying. They locked the content and limited its distribution to only those who pay. Now Digital Rights Management is moving toward covering the description, identification, trading, protection, monitoring and tracking of all forms of rights usages over both tangible and intangible assets including management of rights holders relationships.

Advocates -

    The Entertainment industry, mainly music and cinema, have been hit hard over the past few years with the ease at which DVDs and CDs can be copied. Also many software companies are backing the need for stronger restrictions ( Heather Fleming Phillips SiliconeValley.com). The government is getting pushed into making more restrictions on digital copying.

Opponents -

    Many of your civil liberties are in questioned when dealing with any type of restrictions. How to go about enforcing the restrictions without denying anyone's civil liberties is an issue that must be answered before any major decisions come from the government. Consumer Rights play a big role in dealing with how far to go with these restrictions (Associated Press).