What is Digital Rights Management?
Digital Rights Management (DRM) covers a variety of technologies employed in
the control of access rights to information and various media
such as e-books, music, movies, software and digital
documents.
By controlling access rights (the rights of a user to access,
view or utilize the media) distribution of the media can be
controlled to regulate licensing and unauthorized
redistribution. Such control can be applied for the purpose
protecting copyright or intellectual property, commercial or
military security and compliance to privacy regulations.
Access Rights Management solutions typically consist of
security measures applied according to authorized group level
governed by database records that determine the correct policy
to apply to each file and individual user. The security
mechanizations and rights database records are typically
protected by a cryptographic layer usually comprised of the
most secure encryption methods of the day.
The use of DRM has been
controversial. While its users argue that it's necessary for
copyright holders to protect their livelihood, the public who
generally wants everything for free oppose anything that gets
in their way and strongly supports such opponents as the Free
Software Foundation who are mostly comprised of people who
have never had an original thought and depend on an employer for their living.
Because DRM is designed to prevent plagiarism, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation and other opponents who are incapable of
creating new ideas and innovation, conveniently consider DRM
systems to be anti-competitive practices. Just who and what resources are behind the cracks can be mind
boggling when one hears that Microsoft recently awarded a
Russian software developer with a gold partner shield when
their most recent development was software to crack PDF
password protection(?).
As a consequence of the all in war against
protecting one's livelihood, all widely-used DRM systems have been
targeted and most have been circumvented. Millions of dollars
has gone into the research and development of restricting the
copying of audio visual media but without proprietary
equipment to record and play the media nothing can be 100%
secure.
Digital documents in their normal format can be easily copied
and exported from the workplace both physically and
electronically. Printed documents
can be kept secure if they can be kept away from photocopiers
and the original can be secured at all times. But most
documents today are in digital format and fewer get converted
to paper.
Encryption can secure a document while in transit, but once the
password has been given out or the document is decrypted the
contents are no longer secure and can be copied and redistributed as before.
The DRM Solution
A typical example of how DRM works and how access rights
management further enhances the security of an encrypted
document can be best explained by describing the process used
when accessing an ArtistScope DRM document.
ArtistScope DRM documents can be either web pages or PDF
documents. Web pages are less portable and can only be viewed
via a web browser. In fact in a controlled intranet
environment a web page can be most secure, but for this
exercise lets look at what happens when the document is PDF.
ArtistScope DRM applied to PDF documents are extremely secure.
ArtistScope DRM utilizes CopySafe PDF Converter to encrypt the
document so that it can only be opened and viewed using the
free CopySafe PDF Reader. While it is a free PDF reader that
can protect the document from printing, Printscreen and every
screen capture software ever devised, it is still a generic
reader that can be distributed to everyone for then to share
encrypted PDF documents. But where DRM comes in is that each
document can be encrypted with unique requirements that the
Reader cannot influence. The PDF document created by
ArtistScope DRM will have a unique signature embedded into the
file that is only accessible by the reader for it to check the
DRM database online. The Reader gets the computer's unique
signature (every computer has a unique ID) and submits it to
the online user database looking for a match. If a match is
found the user's privileges will govern what they can or
cannot do with the document such as print, number of copies
that can be printed, how many times the document can be
opened, date after which the document will expire and so on.
So while copies can still be distributed, if DRM has been
applied to the document, then it can be most secure because
the end recipient will not have permission to access the
document. They won't even be able to open it! The only person
who can open that document will be the one intended.
Portability and support
A common misunderstanding is that any document can be
converted to DRM. Why this can never be true is that any
document in its natural file format, while being viewable in
its natural viewer (ie: Word for .doc, Excel for .xls, etc)
cannot be protected. The document needs to have policy added
and then needs to be encrypted to maintain that policy remains
intact. So for each and every document type one needs to use a
custom viewer (ie: .doc files cannot be opened in Adobe
Reader).
Of course it would be much more convenient to have a single
document reader and that is possible if all types of documents
can first be converted to a common format. Most file types
including images, html, PowerPoint, Excel and Word can easily
be converted to PDF format. Then once you have your document
in PDF format it can be encrypted by ArtistScope DRM for
access privileges with copy protection or just as CopySafe PDF
for copy protection.
Webmaster's Note:
ArtistScope DRM is unlike other DRM solutions because it does not use tokens or certificates
which can be exploited, and performing a web search on
"remove DRM from eBooks", "remove DRM from PDF"
or
"extract password from PDF" will confirm just
how easy that is. Instead
ArtistScope DRM uses a remote access server (RAS) to
manage user access rights and privileges. Because
ArtistScope DRM utilizes live validation, authors have total
control over user rights and document properties with
immediate effect over any changes, even on documents
that have already been downloaded to the user's
computer. |
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