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In the past, when the content was analog in nature, there was no need for DRM techniques. It was easier to buy a new copy of any form of a copyrighted work on a physical medium (paper, film, tape) rather than to produce such a copy independently. Producing a copy, instead of buying it, was time-consuming and often expensive for most users. The quality of such a copy also suffered as a result, thus making the copy process less attractive, or in some cases, less effective.
Copyright holders have, nonetheless, persistently objected to new techniques of copying and reproduction. Examples include controversies surrounding introduction of audio tape, VCR, and radio broadcast. In that sense, the DRM controversy is a continuation of a long standing conflict between copyright holders and the use of any new technology for copying.
The situation changed with the introduction of digital technologies. It became possible to produce an essentially perfect copy of any digital recording with minimal effort. With the advent of the personal computer, software piracy became an issue in the 1970s. Development of the Internet in 1990s virtually eliminated the need for a physical medium to perform transfers of recordings.
Although technical control measures for software have been common since the 1980s, DRM is increasingly being used for 'artistic' works too. Some would like to use DRM mechanisms to control other "proprietary information", particularly trade secrets and uncopyrightable facts in databases (see also database protection laws ).
In contrast to the existing legal restrictions which copyright imposes on the owner of a copy, most DRM schemes would enforce additional restrictions to be imposed solely at the discretion of the copyright holder.
DRM vendors and publishers originally coined the term "digital rights management" to refer to these types of technical measures. In contrast, because the "rights" that the content owner chooses to grant are not necessarily the same as the actual legal rights of the content consumer, DRM opponents maintain the phrase "digital rights management" is a misnomer, and that "digital restrictions management" is a more accurate characterization of the functionality of DRM systems. They often cite a famous example of DRM overreach. Adobe Systems released in 2000 a public domain work, Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, with DRM controls asserting that "this book cannot be read aloud" and so disabling use of the text-to-speech feature normally available in Adobe eBook Reader.
In the extreme, such control is proposed to be enforced through so-called trusted computing. Opponents maintain that this creates the prospect of a computer system which cannot be trusted by its owner, because its behavior can be remotely manipulated at any time, regardless of the legal merits of such manipulation. Most opponents have little faith that the courts or legislatures will be able to limit such manipulation to only that which is legally permitted.
Several laws relating to DRM have been proposed or already enacted in various jurisidictions (State, Federal, non-US). Some of them will require all computer systems to have mechanisms controlling the use of digital media. (See Professor Edward FeltenEdward William Felten (born March 25, 1963) is a professor of computer science at Princeton University. Felten has done a variety of computer security research, including groundbreaking work on proof-carrying authentication but he is perhaps best known fo's freedom-to-tinker Web site for information and pointers to the current debate on these matters).
An early example of a DRM system is the Content Scrambling System (CSS) employed by the DVD ForumThe DVD Forum is an international organization composed primarily of hardware and software companies that use and develop the DVD format. It was initially known as the DVD Consortium when it was founded in 1995. Mission The DVD Forum was created to facili on movie DVDDVD is an optical disc storage media format that is used for playback of movies with high video and sound quality and for storing data. DVDs are similar in appearance to compact discs. History During the early 1990s there were two high density optical sto disks. It was originally developed by Matsushita in Japan. The data on the DVD is encryptedThis article is about algorithms for encryption and decryption. For an overview of cryptographic technology related to encryption, see cryptography. In cryptography, encryption is the process of obscuring information to make it unreadable without special so that it can only be decoded and viewed using an encryption key, which the DVD Consortium kept secret. In order to gain access to the keyA key is a piece of information that controls the operation of a cryptography algorithm. In encryption, a key specifies the particular transformation of plaintext into ciphertext, or vice versa during decryption. Keys are also used in other cryptographic, a DVD player manufacturer was required to sign a license agreement with the DVD Consortium which restricted them from including certain desireable features in their players, such as a digital output which could be used to extract a high-quality digital copy of the movie. Since the only market hardware capable of decoding the movie was controlled by the DVD Consortium, they hoped to be able to impose whatever restrictions they chose on the playback of such movies. See also DIVX for a more restrictive and less commercially successful variant of this scheme which is no longer marketed. That name is also used ( DivX), in ironic tribute to the defunct disk "protection" scheme, for an implementation of the MPEG-4 video compression protocol.
To date, all DRM systems have failed to meet the challenge of protecting the rights of the copyright owner while also respecting the rights of the purchaser of a copy. None have succeeded in preventing criminal copyright infringement by organized, unlicensed, commercial pirates. Flaws of some well known systems include: