Digital Rights Management (DRM)

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is intended to protect the legitimate rights and interests of a media owner. So given the ease with which perfect copies can be made in the digital world it is not surprising that DRM is getting a lot of attention.

But is it appropriate for the digital screen-media market? As it stands the answer is a clear no. The issue is one of practicality:

• Most DRM is based on consumer applications and there is a fundamental difference in the type of usage, ie personal use on own equipment versus public viewing on a dedicated system.
• Media owner originated DRM techniques are likely to vary from supplier to supplier, there are plenty of techniques to choose from. This would be quite unworkable for a distributed media network with a large number of remote media players.
• It would inevitably add cost and most likely for no benefit as screen-media networks are invariably closed media systems, there should be no entry points for people to access and copy media.

It seems safe to say that DRM, as it is currently, would be both unworkable and unnecessary in the networked screen-media industry.