Digital Rights Management (DRM)

Digital rights management is an industry technology that protects various forms of digital content such as financial reports, online digital music, electronic books, product specification, etc. DRM is essentially an access and usage control technology in the application level. Most people have heard of software licensing and digital library lending services but perhaps not related it with Digital Rights Management (DRM). The purpose of DRM is to prevent unauthorized access and redistribution of digital content and to restrict the customer from specific use activities like copying, sharing, and cut & paste.

To better understand digital rights, one must remember that plays, books, pictures, films, music and other digital content are subjected

These security features can only be achieved by having strong cryptographic products available and those not restricted by government. Electronic commerce application should provide confidentiality and integrity to realize its social and economic benefit (TORRUBIA, MORA, & MARTI, 2001). Encryption is often the most effective way of providing confidentiality and integrity to the users of the application. Today online purchases of software, audio and video have become an important part of electronic commerce. The major obstacle is that digital media distribution and copying threatens intellectual property rights. This tends to affect the revenue of the intellectual property owners. Digital rights management is there to safeguard the interests of the intellectual property owners. DRM features include; copy control, access control, usage metering and traceability (TORRUBIA, MORA, & MARTI, 2001). DRM uses encryption to authenticate users and provide access control by separating the encrypted content from the keys required to decrypt the

Some content providers restrict any copying, printing and sharing of their content through the license key and device application used.

Digital rights management in Online Music Industry

In the online music business digital rights management is seen as a technology that encapsulates, controls and manages content. DRM can be on a server or desktop computer of the consumer. When the DRM technology is on the server it requires the user to be online to purchase digital music which is referred to as the tethered model and this model is used by Intel, Microsoft, and IBM (Kwok, 2002). All the licenses for distribution and management are provided by a centralized license services center.

The other model is the untethered whereby the user can purchase digital music offline. In this case a local DRM service center is installed on the user’s desktop computer. The untethered model is used to promote super-distribution of music. Though the untethered model can cause delays and interruption in translation of the music because it requires highly complex applications to run a local DRM service center (Kwok,