Digital Rights Management: Definition, Aspects and Overview of Technologies
Niels Rump, Rightscom Ltd. London
Digital Rights Management is a fairly recent technology – it came into use only in the mid 1990s. Nevertheless, it has already lived through a life cycle of ups and downs that many technologies would require decades for.
Digital Rights Management, or DRM, has been called the saviour of intellectual property rights as well as completely useless in protecting assets; it has been said that it is accepted and is used by the participants in the content value chain while others say DRM is not used at all.
This paper takes a closer look at the role of DRM in distributing content through networks such as the Internet and indicates what types of technology are available, in what environments they exist and how well today’s DRM systems fulfil what is expected of them by various members of the content value chain. [...]
The full article, as it appears in Eberhard Becker; Willms Buhse; Dirk Günnewig; Niels Rump (Eds.). Digital Rights Management – Technological, Economic, Legal and Political Aspects; Springer, 2003; ISBN 3-540-40465-1, can be found here as a PDF.