Digital Rights Management And It's Death
How DRM Hurts Consumers And The Entertainment Industry
Digital Rights Management And It's Death
Digital Rights Management, or DRM for short, has played a big part in todays rights protection technology. DRM is a set of different restrictions placed on video or music files so that their use can be restricted by a third-party. This third party is typically the company which holds the legal copyright to the movie or song.
While many people think DRM is just one single copyright protection technique, it isn´t. It´s an entire set of technologies that are developed to help companies get a better hold on the content that they release. For example, DRM can instantly verify if the person using the file is actually the person that originally purchased the song. DRM technology can also limit the number of computers that a file can be used on.
One of the major downsides to DRM is that the restrictions aren´t always clear when you first purchase the digital product.
AAC, or Advanced Audio Coding, is one file which does support DRM technology, however. Made popular by iTunes and iPod, AAC is loosely based on Apple´s Quicktime file formats. AAC can compress files much better than MP3, which makes it an ideal candidate for digital music providers.
WMA, or Windows Media Audio, is a closed sourced media file which was originally designed to defeat MP3. Since then, it is actually now a major competitor to AAC. Since it fully supports DRM technology, it makes it an ideal format for music purchases online. The latest versions of WMA give better quality than AAC and MP3 - it is CD quality sound on a smaller file.
Digital Rights Management became popular in 2005 through the case between the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) agains SonyBMG. It became known as the rootkit case.
Most digital right owners became aware that these technologies are not able to solve the distribution of copyrighted material. More and more it developed to a trend, offering content DRM free. In the recent month major record companies, like EMI planed to release DRM free songs in the near futur.
Digital Rights Management did in the end only benefit the inventors of the protection technologies. Neither consumers, nor the contentowners had a real advantage by using it. Let's hope it will soon become a part of technologic history.
About the Author
Written by MrBuzz. Find more information on DRM at the Entertainment, Music, Media and Marketing News Blog - BuzzBurster.com
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