What You Must Know About DRM

3 The Advent of Digital Rights Management (DRM) In the early days of the Internet, the slogan "information wants to be free" was the catch phrase of the day, and the Internet was viewed as a vehicle for expanding democratic space and the exchange of ideas and information. At the same time, businesses saw the Internet as a platform for e-commerce ­ the buying and selling of goods in cyberspace. In particular, many corporations that hold copyright over music, movies and books viewed the Internet as a potential vehicle for marketing and selling these products in digital format to consumers. These same corporations, however, also perceived the Internet as posing a threat to their ability to control the distribution of digital content. The development of "peer-to-peer" music-sharing networks such as Napster, and new technologies such as MP3 players, have greatly alarmed corporate copyright owners, who believe that such innovations promote online piracy of their intellectual property. Corporate copyright owners have responded to this perceived threat by promoting the development of DRM. In a broad sense, DRM includes not only the technologies that are used to secure digital content from unauthorized distribution or copying, but also the laws, contracts and licenses that impose restrictions on the use of such material. Although DRM technologies are commonly used to protect commercial content (e.g., music and movies), they can also be used to protect other digital content, such as corporate information (e.g., legal documents) and personal information (e.g., medical records). 7 However, DRM technologies are most commonly used to protect "popular" digital content such as music and movies from being copied, altered, saved, printed or transmitted to third parties. According to EPIC, DRM technologies secure content in two ways. First, they use "containment," which involves encrypting digital content in a shell so that only authorized users can access it. Second, they use "marking," which is the practice of placing a watermark, flag or XrML tag on content to signal to a device that the media is copy protected. 8 In the United States, the advent of DRM has been accompanied by legislative protections. In 1998, the U.S. Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), 9 which bans technology designed to circumvent copyright protection technologies, such as DRM. Both corporate giants ­ such as Microsoft ­ and smaller players ­ such as SunnComm ­ have developed DRM solutions. For example, several major music labels and online movie companies use Microsoft's Media Rights Manager to deliver digital content securely. Media Rights Manager provides content owners with the ability to limit the number of times a music or movie file can be played; to determine whether a file can be burned onto a CD; and to control whether a file may be copied onto a portable player or other device. 10 Similarly, smaller companies such as SunnComm have developed DRM technologies aimed at preventing music CDs from being copied.