Is DRM the Great Spoiler in the IDM Marketplace?

Digital Rights Management

As music and films are becoming more and more popular for consumption via the Internet, this is exactly where DRM plays its role by providing a secure environment for transactions of copyrighted content in the networked world to be sold and purchased (Sensarkar, 2007). DRM is a generic term for a set of technologies for the identification and protection of intellectual property in digital form (Sensarkar, 2007). There is no big difference between the electronic and the common meaning of the term “copyright” (Rao, 2003). The term ‘e-copyright’ came from the time of Napster, peer-to-peer file-sharing service. It gave an opportunity to users to illegally distribute and exchange digital music files. File-sharing is a highly dynamic field with variety of publication platforms and access tools. New tools like torrent networks appeared on the horizon that sequentially substitute file-sharing services (Wolf et al., 2007). The challenge is to prevent access to content without an authorization, in other words, consumer’s usage rights must be explicitly expressed so that content providers do not lose out on generating their revenue.