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Digital rights management

Digital Rights Management (DRM) refers to the control, administrating and protection of digital intellectual property (content) in the interest of the owners.

Definition of Digital rights management

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is an issue of controlling and managing intellectual property rights in the interest of the owners to protect their content against copyright infringements or other license violating use. Digital content providers implement DRM with a wide variety of technologies. ^[1][2]

DRM doesn't just stop users from making many copies of an intellectual property item, but it usually prevents any kind of transfer at all. It will constrain resale and other means of transfer. ^[3] Nowadays, DRM has broadened its scope to description, identification, trading, (copyright) protection, ownership assertion, integrity checks, monitoring and tracking of rights over tangible or in-tangible assets ^[4][5]. These assets include digital content and other digitally distributable assets that can be categorized into five basic types ^[6][5]

• audio
• video
• text and documents
• graphics and images
• software

DRM has been widely adopted by the music industry to simultaneously fight piracy and to monetize their assets ^[1]. DRM is thought to enable business models in the digital age that would otherwise be impossible to maintain profitable ^[2]. Still most content providers of media and entertainment content, such as music, film, or print, have not been profitable in charging consumers for their products. On the other hand they haven't been successful in creating the technology frameworks required to remunerate the content providers and to protect against piracy ^[1]. The current DRM technologies diminish the potential of digital media. They cause prices to increase and accessibility to deteriorate. ^[7]

Values for and against DRM

The basic problem with DRM is the clash between two of the most esteemed values of the modern age, property vs. liberty. The right of property is thought to be the driving force behind efficiency and creativity. Liberty is also highly valued as it stands for democracy, the core of a modern society. The measures to protect property rights lead to the dictatorship of the fortune, which seems to be against values derived from liberty.

The Internet has become a symbol of freedom, and it has turned out as the major threat to property rights. If there is any "ownership" in the Internet, it is the ownership of the consumers (or the public), and the consumers resist any attempt to restrict accessibility, including total and free accessibility to digital media. Rights protection in the ways DRM does it is considered lost of freedom. ^[7]

Motivation for DRM

Content providers see their business being threatened by technology advances in hardware, software and IP-networks such as the Internet or peer-to-peer file sharing systems. The result is an increasing amount of illegal copies (piracy) available on-line as well as off-line. ^{[8] [1] [7]} This threatens to create a culture in which intellectual creation is not considered "property" and the rights of the owners are not valued. Alarmed by this hazard, intellectual property owners have created counter forces that impede the progress of technology and prevent it from unleashing its full potential. ^[7]

Digital copyright has become a major concern for businesses that engage in online content distribution through various business models, such as pay-per-view, subscription, trading, and so on. This is because a perfect copy of the distributed content can be reproduced at close-to-zero cost. Losses due to copyright infringement have increased dramatically ^[6]. Current copyright laws are perhaps inadequate for dealing with digital data, leading to interest in developing other copyright protection mechanisms ^[5]

Online content distribution businesses require methods to protect intellectual property of distributed content. Intellectual property protection as part of DRM is a mechanism to protect the rights of ownership of original work so that no one can use the rights-protected work in any way without seeking permission for the use and, if necessary, paying the rights owners a royalty for the use ^[6].

Two different perspectives have been identified in literacy: some believe in DRM as piracy protection and other do not see DRM reducing piracy. The companies that assume that DRM systems will not be able to reduce piracy often see business solutions, such as value added services, as the appropriate tool to fight piracy ^[1]. DRM systems can be used for creating value adding services as well as protecting content.

Others perceive piracy as having a huge impact on their company. They use multiple DRM technologies only for protection purposes and no value added services or products are provided to consumers. They believe that DRMS alone will be able to reduce piracy ^[1].

Functionality of DRM

DRM technology, when properly designed and implemented, can enable an electronic market and maximize the utility of digital works for the total community. It is argued that DRM is the best solution so far for combating piracy, monetizing intellectual assets and for adding value to digital content ^[1][8].

Vendors have also goals outside of intellectual property protection in mind when implementing DRM. It can also track every single copy that a user has purchased. This method lets the seller collect huge amounts of information about what each purchaser might want while creating questionable privacy issues. Still, people don't seem to complain much that e.g Amazon collects information about their purchases in order to recommend books or DVDs to them ^[3]

Pros for the consumer

• Acquire and use digital content legally
• Pay only for the effective use of the digital content (e.g. pay-per-view, pay-per-listen)

Cons for the consumer

• Risk of data and privacy infringement
• DRMS have the potential to dispose of fair use and individuals will lose the right to have a private copy
• It will restrict innovation, research, free speech, and public access to digital information
• No DRMS standards exist
  • Potential for compatibility problems
• DRMS are conceptually simple but extremely difficult to implement

^[6]

The functionality of DRM enables the owners of IPR to have control over their intellectual property in various ways. The most common objecives of DRM include ^[8]:

• Access and usage control
• Protecting against piracy
  • Copy control/protection
  • Identification by metadata or watermarking
• Getting marketing information
• Improving revenues
• Protection of authenticity and integrity
• Limit usage to specific hardware and software
• Temporal limitations e.g. expiration of license

Copy & content protection

Software publishers use Digital Rights Management, specifically copy-protection techniques, to prevent unauthorized and illegal copying of their software products ^[9]

In certain applications, a content owner may want to publicly and freely provide a preview of the multimedia content being sold. To make the preview commercially worthless, the content could be stamped with a visible (or audible) watermark very difficult to remove in an automated way ^[5]

Ownership assertion

DRM technologies can be used to establish ownership over some content. This way digitally distributed assets can be later identified and ownership claimed even when information of the origin, trail of copies or other information of exchange is missing ^[5]

Fingerprinting

To avoid unauthorized duplication and distribution of publicly available content, an author can embed a distinct watermark (or fingerprint) into each copy of the data. If unauthorized copies are found later, the origin of the copy can be determined by retrieving the fingerprint ^[5]

Authentication and integrity verification

When multimedia content is used for legal purposes, medical applications, news reporting, or commercial transactions, the originator of the content has to be verified while ensuring the content has not been changed, manipulated, or falsified ^[5]

Usage control

In a closed system in which the multimedia content needs special hardware for copying and viewing, a digital watermark can be inserted to indicate the number of copies permitted ^[5]

Technologies associated with DRM

Nowadays, most content providers are protecting their digital content. However, they use a variety of technologies and a combination of these technologies to control access to and usage of their digital content. Each protection technology has its specific goal ^[1]. Although many techniques have been proposed, there is still no known technique that can survive a resourceful and clever attacker. Software publicly available on the Internet has been shown to be effective in breaking several commercial techniques ^[5].

Core protection technologies ^[1]

• Encryption
• Passwords
• Watermarking
  • Digital signature
  • Digital fingerprint
• Copy detection systems
• Payment systems

Digital watermarking is the core technology in electronic rights protection. A digital watermark is digital data that can be embedded in digital contents and it allows one to establish ownership, identify a buyer, or add additional information about the digital content. ^[6] In general, a watermarking enables ownership assertion, fingerprinting, authentication and integrity verification, content labeling, usage control and content protection ^{[6] [5]}. Watermarks in digital music and video may not always be imperceptible for humans ^[6].

In cryptographic-based copyright protection, digital contents are always distributed in their encrypted forms. Given proper permission from the content provider or owner, clients are allowed to access the encrypted contents. However, when a piece of encrypted digital content is decrypted, it becomes ordinary digital content that is no longer protected and carries no copyright information. As a result it is almost impossible for the cryptographic-based copyright management system to trace the person who has distributed the illegal copy of the digital content or to discover from where it actually came. For that reason combinations of watermarking techniques and encrypting is widely used ^[6]

Relevance to software business

Software publishers use Digital Rights Management, specifically copy-protection techniques, to prevent unauthorized and illegal copying of their software products ^[9]. Research shows that in 2007, global piracy rate was 38 % (the percentage of total software installed that was not legally acquired) with financial losses estimated to be around 48 billion USD ^[10]

One reason why the potential cost advantages of online software distribution have not been fully exploited are the software publishers' concerns regarding illegal copying of their software products. Online distribution does only allow for copyprotection techniques based on intangible tokens, which offer less protection from illegal copying than physical ones as these are harder to copy or generate. ^[9]

The need for DRM has increased along with the increase of consumers' telecommunications bandwidth resulting in digital file transfer and copying over the Internet ^[11]. This applies to software business as well as to other businesses distributing any form of digital content.

Theoretical approaches

Currently interesting research questions

Contemporary discussion and criticism

There has been considerable unease about the effect that DRM will have on user privacy. Because the DRM client can be configured to collect usage data each time the user accesses content, the potential for serious intrusions into the privacy of users is created ^[11]

What's right and what's wrong in the Digita Age?

The public doesn't seem to think they are criminals or harming anyone when they are listening to pirated copies of music in their every day life. How could this attitude be changed? Most people are pretty happy to pay a fair price for service and goods so why not for immaterial goods transferred over the Internet ^[7]?

Links to related articles

• Intellectual Property Legislation
• Business models on DRM
• Cost effectiveness of DRM
• Digital rights management
• Intellectual property rights

See also

References

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8} M. Fetscherin & M. Schmid, The Application of Digital Rights Management Systems in the Music Industry - An Empirical Investigation, Proceedings of the Third International Conference WEB Delivering of Music, 2003
2. ↑ ^{2.0 2.1} L. Sobel, DRM as an Enabler of Business Models: ISPs as Digital Retailers, Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 2003
3. ↑ ^{3.0 3.1} M. Lesk, Digital Rights Management and Individualized Pricing, IEEE Security & Privacy, 2008
4. ↑ E. Luoma & H. Vahtera, Current and Emerging Requirements for Digital Rights Management Systems Through Examination of Business Networks, Proceedings of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2004
5. ↑ ^{5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9} N. Memon & P. W. Wong, Protecting Digital Media Content, Communications of ACM, Vol. 41, 1998, http://www.itu.dk/courses/DSK/doc/p35-memon.pdf
6. ↑ ^{6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7} S.H. Kwok, C.C. Yang, K.Y. Tam, Intellectual Property Protection For Electronic Commerce Applications, Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, 2004
7. ↑ ^{7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4} Z. Lifshitz, Digital Rights Management - a zero-sum game?, EUROCON, 2003
8. ↑ ^{8.0 8.1 8.2} M. Fetscherin & M. Schmid, Comparing the Usage of Digital Rights Management Systems in the Music, Film, and Print Industry, ACM International Conference Proceeding Series (Vol. 50), 2003
9. ↑ ^{9.0 9.1 9.2} P. Djekic & C. Loebbecke, Software Piracy Prevention through Digital Rights Management Systems, Proceedings of the Seventh IEEE International Conference on E-Commerce Technology, 2005
10. ↑ Summary of findings: 2007 Global Software Piracy Study, Business Software Alliance, http://global.bsa.org/idcglobalstudy2007//studies/summaryfindings_globalstudy07.pdf, 2008
11. ↑ ^{11.0 11.1} Richard Owens & Rajen Akalu, Legal Policy and Digital Rights Management, Proceedings of the IEEE (Vol. 92, No. 6), June 2004