Digital Rights Management Case Study

2157 Words9 Pages
This section provides the definitions that are essential to the research scope. It first defines what digital rights management (DRM) is. Based on that it clarifies the definition of DRM interoperability. 1.1.1 Digital Rights Management The term Digital Rights Management (DRM) has been defined by various parties in many occasions. To better elaborate on the variety of DRM definitions, sample definitions from different disciplines are presented as following: Cambridge Business English Dictionary (2015) define DRM as “the way that a company controls how users pay for music, films, books, etc. that are available on the Internet or on electronic equipment in a digital form.” Rosenblatt et al., (2001) referred DRM as “a set of business models and…show more content…
(2001). DRM does utilize a set of technologies, such as encryption etc. However, all the technologies serve DRM as tools to realize the business models that DRM was designed to enable. Therefore, as an enabler of new business model for the content industry, DRM has more than just technology perspective, such as business and legal perspectives. The different perspectives of DRM are discussed in the Section 1.2. On the other hand, the author of the dissertation does not want to limit the scope of DRM to a fixed set of content as Rosenblatt et al. (2001) do. The Internet assigned numbers authority (IANA 2016) categorizes digital content according to media types, such as application, audio, example, image, message, model, multipart, text, and video. New types of digital content are emerging all the time, e.g. virtual reality content. DRM should be applicable to any sort of digital content that needs to be distributed and consumed in a controlled manner. DRM should act as a bridge between rights holders of the digital content and consumers in digital…show more content…
System interoperability exists between DRM system X and Z. Device interoperability between A and B is achieved by DRM system X with a separate DRM agent A(X) on device A and B(X) on device B. Application interoperability between B1 and B2 is achieved by DRM system X with its DRM agent B(X) integrated in both applications. Once system interoperability is achieved between two systems, device interoperability and application interoperability can be improved as well. As illustrated in Figure 5, existence of system interoperability between X and Z also indirectly achieves the device interoperability between A and B for DRM system Z as content and rights governed by Z can be transferred to device A and consumed by the DRM agent A(X). Similarly, application interoperability between B1 and B3 is achieved for both DRM systems X and Z as content and rights from both systems can be consumed on both applications integrated with their DRM agents. In summation, different levels of DRM interoperability can be achieved in different manners. System interoperability needs two DRM systems to interact with each other. System interoperability can improve the application and device interoperability as the device and application coverage from DRM systems combined is larger than individual coverages of any DRM systems. On the other hand, the application interoperability and device interoperability
Open Document