1 - Introduction—Digital Rights Management

Abstract

This chapter provides an introduction to digital rights management (DRM). A basic notion that should be considered in understanding DRM is to balance privacy with notions of piracy. Ironically, the emphasis on protecting privacy has been trumped in many ways by the goal of securing against piracy. DRM is a subject with many competing stakeholders that new paradigms or business models do not appear obvious, and the viewpoints are not exclusive. It is prudent to provide an outline of copyrights, not in the interests of providing any form of legal advice, but to delineate the impact of copyright protection evolvement with respect to the U.S. copyright law. Copyright is a form of contract between the creator of original work and the public, based on the recognition of property rights, in general, the creator agrees to make his work publicly available in consideration of legal recognition under the law. . Two conventional techniques can be described for providing key-based confidentiality and authentication: symmetric and asymmetric encryption. Both systems use non-secret algorithms to provide encryption, decryption, and keys that are used by the algorithm. To assure confidentiality and authenticity, the key should be known only to the sending and receiving entities. Copy protection also includes various methods by which an engineer can write software in a clever manner to determine if it has been copied and, if so, to deactivate the software. The chapter also discusses DRM––wrapping and embedding that makes data safe digitally. The chapter summarizes that it is not only copyrighted media that is impacted by debates and advances over DRM. All intellectual property will be subjected to similar pressures. Trust itself shapes many of the compromises that are needed in commercializing network.