Digital Rights Management: The Four Perspectives of Developers, Distributors, Users, and Lawyers

Digital Rights Management (DRM) refers to a collection of security mechanisms that are widely deployed on a number of copyright-protected digital assets. However, despite the existence of a number of studies of the technical architectures of rights management security systems, there is little scholarly/academic literature dedicated to the human aspects associated with circumvention of DRM security. Using videogames as a case study, this paper discusses how DRM is perceived differently depending on where one’s stake in the use of DRM security lies. This paper concludes by proposing questions that could be used to aid content distributors and security practitioners in the creation of a fairer DRM framework.