Ever wonder why you cant download a movie that you bought and share it? Ever want to read an e-book you purchased but on a different reading platform? Did you try to share or download a song for free online only to find that website shut down the next day? Well then you have been affected by DRM or Digital Rights Management. DRM is used to protect people from copyright infringement. It protects the production of music and videos from illegal distribution and keeps the profits in the hands of the producers and artist that it originated from. DRM does not allow the sharing of music, e-books, movies, etc. without the consent of the original owner. It keeps the rights in the hands of the copyright owner and disrupts the spread of illegal material. DRM has evolved thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 which attacked any attempt to bypass DRM.
How does DRM work?
At first DRM was only made to be used to stop illegal copying of copyrighted material. Once media went digital producers ahd to find a way to protect their copyrighted material from spreading like repid fire. DRM works in three different ways: first they establish a copyright for a piece of content, then they manage the distribution of that copyrighted content and finally control what a consumer can do with that content once it has been distributed. DRM also controls how a user uses the material after it has been paid for. For example, if Jon Doe downloads a song in which he was entitled through his subscription to a legal online service, DRM now controls if he can share it, download another song in a certain time period or even the amount he can listen to it. Now Microsoft is building DRM into their computer programs:
How does this affect me at all?
When music was only on vinyl records the record industries did not care very much about DRM because music was not digital. Vinyl records may have been illegally reproduced but not on a large scale or the illegal recording might have been of a live version of a song that the recording company had no intention of reproducing for profit anyway. After vinyl came cassette tapes and the use of blank tapes to copy previously purchased material. By the time the recording industry could bother with this the use of digital media and CDs took over. In todays day and age the use of social media sharing sites, online radio and file sharing services have made the development of DRM even more necessary. In the coming years DRM technology will catch up with the music industry and strict sharing, playing and copying rules will dominate the music industry.
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