Addressing Content Piracy with Digital Rights Management (DRM)

The World Wide Web has an enormous volume of data floating about in it, which is growing in size each day. One of the most significant challenges — in addition to managing the colossal amount of data — is to prevent piracy and unauthorized sharing.

To protect their data, organizations invest in setting up data centers that have continuous surveillance to prevent the information from being hacked. However, data protection is not only vulnerable in its storage phase but also during transfer as well as once it reaches the recipient.

Almost every industry, especially the e-book and publishing industry, has been on the first line of attack for cybercriminals and hackers. The entertainment industry too is highly vulnerable to data attacks. These breaches not only ruin the integrity of premium content but also cause tremendous financial losses to content creators.

In spite of industry efforts to thwart piracy, data theft continues to flourish, resulting in billions of dollars of financial loss for companies each year. Until recently, organizations would distribute e-books and published titles using the basic security of software solutions.

However, one effective way of implementing stronger security protocols in content licensing agreements is through Digital Rights Management. Here we look into the effectiveness of DRM, as a technology, in deterring piracy.

Typically speaking, although there is no precise rule to apply DRM protection, it can be defined as the level of protection that your content requires. Generally, content owners implement encryption to prevent their documents from being used by unauthorized individuals or prevent its transfer in any manner without a decryption key.

But, content cannot be protected by encryption alone, since decryption keys can be stolen.

DRM systems provide a unique licensing server and legitimate digital rights (document controls) to monitor use of the content, along with encryption, thus providing better and robust processes to safeguard the data. With the help of DRM, you can regulate how your document files can be distributed, accessed and used.

The purpose of DRM technology is to protect your rights as the content creator. By implementing DRM on documents that require protection, it can put a complete stop on illegitimate access, replication and distribution of the files.

DRM protected files, and PDF copies are incisively encoded and made available only to permitted devices and authorized users. However, it needs to be moderated in the right manner.

Additional ways in which DRM can protect your content include

• Preventing or restricting unauthorized users from modifying or saving your data
• Avoiding or limiting unauthorized users from transferring or sharing your protected information
• Preventing or restricting unauthorized users from printing the protected document
• Stopping users from capturing screenshots of the data
• Setting expiry dates on the protected copy, after which the content will no longer be accessible. This can also be done by restricting the number of uses by a particular user. For example, a DRM protected file would be revoked after the user has viewed or opened the document three times.
• Blocking access to specific IP locations, addresses, and even devices. This means that your PDF document can only be made available only to a particular locality; readers or users in other countries cannot access it.
• Watermarking documents to demonstrate identity and proprietorship

Digital Rights Management makes it easier for companies to supervise and prevent data theft. Besides, auditors can also investigate and identify data theft or a breach with the help of DRM technology. To meet data protection regulations, financial service organizations and healthcare companies are increasingly turning to DRM to safeguard their data.

There is a whole new world of possibilities in the digital world when it comes to securing classified data, including intellectual property. For instance, authors are no longer concerned with readers making physical copies of books through a copy machine.

In the digital world, the new challenge for e-book creators and authors is to protect their intellectual property online and prevent digital piracy. By implementing Digital Rights Management on e-books and PDF files, users can be prevented from altering and modifying the content.

Not just e-book writers and authors, but scientists can also safely rely on DRM technology to safeguard their content from being copied and rebranded as someone else’s work.

Every content creator spends time and effort on building original content in the hope of recouping their investments once it is published. DRM technology can ensure that only those users, who pay to buy the content, can view it.

Moreover, it can also ensure that the material is available only to a specific audience. All this while, helping to protect the creator’s bottom lines and control the transfer and distribution of their content.