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Digital rights management

Written by Ana Canteli on 30 October 2018

Digital rights management is a concept that deals with the electronic frontier and the techniques that owners of intellectual property & digital rights of digital assets and users use to fulfil copyright laws while using digital rights.

At a real level, it is management software and hardware designed to protect the copyright and intellectual property of original works in digital format. In this way, the holder of the rights obtains a direct advantage in the possibility of managing the continuous form over time, the control over his or her work.

This concept is known as DRM (Digital Rights Management) or DRM technology, which is used mostly among creatives, authors and publishers to protect against illegal activities such as digital piracy, through the establishment of digital restrictions based on different circumstances and conditions. Its legal basis was stipulated in 1996 in an agreement approved by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has an active part in the digital rights management whose goal is to dedicate their efforts to preserve and promote internet civil liberties in the context of the current digital age. In fact, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is a leading supporter of the Email Privacy Act, a law that updated the legislation and increased the requirements for the state to access private emails.

The OpenKM content management software works as a digital rights management DRM for organizations that wish to establish a platform for the access, distribution, and control of digital content among their users.

In OpenKM DRM technology, you can define users, who, depending on their profile and the roles that can be played on the DRM system, will be able to access the contents under the conditions that determine the author or administrator of the works contained in the digital management software.

In the OpenKM content management system, only users with a login and password can access the manager. However, through the KCenter platform, the organization has the possibility to create a personalized environment - associated with the DRM software- that allows access to users, which has not been authenticated. Here they can access the digital library of public domain (books electronic, folders, registers, emails, multimedia content and more) and specific functionalities, such as forms, reports, or wizards for uploading or downloading information from any digital media. The OpenKM digital rights management solution can be used as a secure electronic delivery service to allow the public access to media that can be seriously threatened through the physical access; or otherwise, only available to those present in the facilities of the organization.

The OpenKM enterprise digital rights management system meets the characteristics of any digital rights manager DRM:

• Identifies the user who accesses the resource, when they do it, and under what conditions; defined by the copyright holders according to the copyright laws.
• Authorizes or denies access to digital content, according to the conditions established by the author or administrator of the work, who can change them at any time, to ensure adequate control of their rights.
• When the authorization takes place, the conditions of use and enjoyment of the content is under the control of the administrator.

Therefore, with OpenKM DRM technology, organizations can manage digital rights through the stipulation and application of a central policy, which identifies and describes the intellectual property and specifies the rules for its use (creation of users, definition, and assignment of roles and profiles to users). And on the other hand, it guarantees the digital management of the rights that certify the works in digital format and enforces the rules implemented by the owner of those rights (security management at the granular level).

In OpenKM, the author or owner of a file can control the access and use of said content at the group level - collective management - or individual level. You can also define what kind of access the public will have: right to read, right to edit, right to download, etc. The administrator of OpenKM can customize the provision of security at the content level. A user that in OpenKM has limited access to a resource, an email, for example; You can see the email, and even preview the message inside the manager. The preview can be protected by a watermark visible on the body of the email. This would be an example of DRM protection of digital rights a priori, as copying is prevented and the illegal copying and unauthorized distribution of electronic mail are discouraged. OpenKM can be used as a file of emails that allows the recovery of lost or accidental emails, the application of eDiscovery in case of litigation or internal investigations, among other functions.

However, protection measures can also be applied a posteriori. For example, in the case that an official wants to filter a document from a claim to the press, this being a user with the right to copy or download. It could do so, but OpenKM would include an invisible watermark in the download or copy, which in turn could contain an embedded barcode or data from the author of the copy and distribution in the form of metadata, which guarantees traceability over the distributed file. The authors or administrators can subscribe to digital content in OpenKM; thus every time a change occurs on the content, the subscribed user will receive a notification by email. Besides, the Reports functionality can be used to generate automated reports about an event of interest or even generate them at will, for example on the use of a digital file, access statistics; to help the author determine the value of it.

The management of metadata in OpenKM can also be used for the management of digital rights. For example, a document that presents a group of metadata Statuses with three states: pending, approved, completed. While the record is pending approval, it is only visible to a small group of users -the content authors-. Once the document is approved, the file becomes accessible to the community of users, who can make extensive use of the text. However, when the status of the document is finished, OpenKM automatically locks the file, converts it to a non-editable digital format and transfers it to a secondary repository accessible for queries.

The OpenKM document management system presents the following advantages as a digital rights manager:

• It guarantees the protection of digital contents: during the processes of storage, reproduction or transfer, the system ensures the integrity of the work in digital format and allows the authors to securely control the successive exploitation of their work and the author's rights.
• Saving for distribution security: identifying the users that use the content, throughout its life cycle (version control, activity log, reports, subscription service, etc.)
• Protection of authors' copyright -copyright laws-; by presenting data related to the digital identity of the works, author, rights holder, editors, representatives, and others.
• Control of transactions; through fingerprinting techniques or watermarking the owner and/or issuer of the content and the buyer or addressee can be identified at the same time. It helps to create better digital content posts that are protected against unauthorized dissemination.
• Identifies the participants of the system: what it means to manage the confidentiality and protection of personal data properly.

The success of internet business models depends in no small extent on the protection of digital rights -digital rights management DRM-. In this aspect, the development of digital rights management is the basis on which the management of electronic rights is founded upon.