2 Digital Rights Management : Technological Aspects 2 . 1 Definition , Aspects , and Overview

Digital Rights Management is a fairly recent technology — it came into use only in the mid 1990s. Nevertheless, it has already lived through a life cycle of ups and downs that many technologies would require decades for. Digital Rights Management, or DRM, has been called “the saviour” of intellectual property rights as well as “completely useless” in protecting assets; it has been said that it is “accepted and is used” by the participants in the content value chain while others say DRM is “not used at all”. This paper takes a closer look at the role of DRM in distributing content through networks such as the Internet and indicates what types of technology are available, in what environments they exist and how well today’s DRM systems fulfil what is expected of them by various members of the content value chain.