Digital Rights Management: An Integrated Secure Digital Content Distribution Technology

The ability to distribute copyrighted works in digital form through high capacity prerecorded disks (CD ROMs, DVDs etc.) and Internet-enabled transmissions have brought new challenges to the protections of such content from unauthorized copying and use. Technological advancements in this regard are reviewed. Despite the ease with which digital content owners can now transfer data, images, music, video and multimedia documents across the Internet, current technology does not let them protect their rights to the works, which has resulted into widespread music and video piracy. In fact, although the Internet permits widespread dissemination of digital content, the easy-to-copy nature of digital data limits content owners’ willingness to distribute their documents electronically. Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology is a key enabler for the distribution of digital content. DRM refers to protecting ownership/copyright of electronic content by restricting the extent of usage an authorized recipient is allowed in regard to that content. DRM technology has historically been viewed as the methodology for the protection of digital media copyrights. But DRM technology products can be leveraged to address much larger issues, including the control of rights and usage permissions of content and digital information. DRM presents the opportunity to package, price, distribute and sell content in many new ways that have never been possible before. The paper discusses about the digital medium, digital watermarking, copy protection techniques (CPT), important legal developments and issues, court cases, DRM applications, DRM technology overviews, and DRM enabling technologies and standardization. It also discusses about the initiative taken by the Department of Information Technology for a watermarking project.