Pocket PC eBooks Watch - eBook and beyond  
 http://cebooks.blogspot.com 

Faces of Death
The Many Faces of DRM
Digital Rights Management (DRM) has been something of an enigma for the computer industry since it burst onto the scene in the late 1990s. Digital Rights Management (DRM) has been something of an enigma for the computer industry since it burst onto the scene in the late 1990s.
Originally conceived as a way to lock and protect electronic content, such as music and ebooks, this vision never really materialized. A few years ago, Forrester Research published a report called Content Out of Control, in which they asked content owners what they thought the most important thing a DRM partner could provide. Fifty-eight percent chose "Rock Solid Security" as the most important feature. Yet Napster proved just how allusive this goal really was.
Forced to regroup, many DRM companies took a new tack. Rather than approaching DRM by trying to lock the content away and prevent users from getting at it, they decided instead to focus on making it easier to access material within a rights management framework that allows the customer to define, at increasingly granular levels, who can access the material and what they can do with it. Instead of targeting traditional media producers as they had done the first time around, they pursued the enterprise customer managing vast amounts of online data. The primary target industries included large publishers, science, and finance.
It's clear that each DRM solution provider--along with their clients--have come up with a distinctly different methodology for helping control access to online information via the enterprise, with the given solution tailored for the industry and market being served:
* DigitalOwl places a piece of software on the end-user's desktop that monitors and records what he does with the document even when not connected to the network.
* Copyright Clearance Center allows customers to purchase reprint rights at the point of sale on the Web site based on rules the customer defines.
* eMeta allows the customer to finely control the way information is presented to the end-user, then define different levels of access before they make content available on the Web site.
* ContentGuard has developed a digital rights language, which they license to the customer, who then develop their own customized digital rights front end using open standards.

posted by Jerry permanent link