27th August 2002
Question: What's this DRM thing I keep hearing about?
Answer: DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. Now, my opinion may creep in, but I will do my best to state just the facts - so keep that in mind before reading any further! Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a way to protect digital media files, such as music and video, from copyright infringement. There are several aspects to DRM; some pertain to online usage and some pertain to offline/local usage. In regards to online usage, the basic way that DRM works is that you have a license to be able to play the media files. This allows online vendors to set an expiration date on the media file, and set usage (for example, whether or not you can burn that media file to a CD). That brings us to DRM offline/local. Many aspects of DRM are run at the operating system level, and don't depend on that computer system being online. Digital Rights Management helps the operating system to protect the media files in many ways, which include protecting (encrypting) the page file made by the media while the media is running, and removing the page file when the media file is closed. DRM also protects the file from an untrusted program running in the background that may steal the file. I know some of you are thinking "I can get around the expiration by changing the system time!" I'm sorry to tell you, but... no, you can't. DRM can even provide a "trusted clock" in place of the system clock. There are many technical aspects of DRM that we could get into, but the important thing is to do some checking for yourself and develop your own opinion. There are good and bad uses of DRM, and I personally feel that DRM is still a little up in the air as to what side of "good" or "bad" it will fall.