The Demand for Information Rights Management

In our world today, nearly every piece of information is digitized for the obvious advantages that digital systems have over analog ones. More so, everything is becoming computerized and this has eased and increased the degree with which people can use and abuse other people’s intellectual property. When we are talking about the digital rights management of items such as DVDs, CD-ROMs, Flash cards containing information such as business reports, audio and videos of important talks or even music, movies etc, we are basically talking about information rights management - the protection of information.

With the advances made with computers, information can no longer be constrained to mainframes where administrators had overall powers over whom could access, use, or alter the information therein. Nowadays, it is very easy to pass on information/digital media to our friends (freely) thus denying the intellectual property owners their rightful proceeds in the form of royalties. There therefore has been an increased demand for information rights management systems that can guarantee that media owners get their rightful share from the use of their media. The IT world has seen a great opportunity to cash in on the development of systems that can control how a person can use information.

The general controls that information rights management systems (IRM) provide us with include control over reading, printing, altering, copying and running media. The read capability controls the number of times and period within which that item can be read. The printing criterion dictates if the item can be printed, the number of copies that can be made if printing is allowed, and the generation of poor quality copies for unauthorized printing. IRM also dictates if an item can be altered by either changing the content or by removing its copyright marks. IRM has efficient control over copying. It restricts the making of copies that are useable by others, copying of particular areas of the work, or even taking screen dumps.

IRM seeks to keep away from the flawed password protection system and the method currently preferred is public key technology. With information rights management systems using public key technology, a file comes encrypted and it is only when the media’s owner licensing server verifies that one is an authorized user that the particular media item will be decrypted for use. The use of cryptography ensures the system is less vulnerable to hacker attacks.

Through the combination of cryptography and access controls, a lot of document parameters can be controlled, but the attempt to use server based encryption with pay-as-you-use methods has not only proved very expensive but has also placed undue strain on server resources. Having information rights management protecting your documents is of the essence because some companies have already suffered the consequences of poor data protection techniques.