Digital Rights Management

Title: Digital Rights Management –a Technological Measure for Copyright Protection and its Possible Impacts on Libraries
Author: Dr. Sabuj Kumar Chaudhuri
Publisher: Mahamaya Publishing House
URL: http://eprints.rclis.org/bitstream/10760/13110/1/Digital_Rights_Management-Impact_on_Libraries.pdf

Abstract

Chaudhuri explains Digital Rights Management (DRM) in different perspectives and approaches. With three perspectives (technological, social and legal), he considers DRM as a technological measure/technique for the protection of intellectual property rights, especially copyrights in content industries. He further explains DRM with the following functional aspects: (1) The identification and description of intellectual property, rights pertaining to works and to parties involved in their creation of administration; and (2) The (technical) enforcement of usage restrictions on these contents. DRM benefits content industries as it provides protection of digital content, enables secure e-book distribution, ensures content authenticity, provides for transaction non-negation, and supports participation identification. Among the most common copyright protection techniques and security features of DRM are encryption, often used in software, and digital watermarking.

The article also presents possible implications of DRM to librarians and libraries. With the librarians’ fundamental role of enabling access for all members of the community to a wide range of knowledge and information, DRM may pose a threat as it controls and limits the use of content that may become a good source of knowledge and information to patrons. But instead of seeing it as a threat, Chaudhuri treats the current situation as a challenge for librarians to take part in the discussions on the development of DRM technologies.

Three-point Learning

1. The advent of computer technology challenges librarians to provide patrons a wide range of access to information without taking for granted authors'/creators' intellectual property rights.

2. DRM must be studied and fully understood by its stakeholders to avoid the idea of it as a threat to a particular sector, but as a good opportunity for all sectors to gain.

3. On a personal note, decryption key in e-books and software/application installation is a tool in DRM to prevent unauthorized copy holders from reading a particular e-book or from using the software/application.

Application

As an active information seeker online and multi-functional software user, this blogger would see to it that he retrieves legal digital contents from legal distributors and properly acknowledge authors and publishers in his research outputs. This blogger will also encourage others to do the same to avoid infringement of intellectual property rights.