Threats In Digital Rights Management

While the contours of copyright law have always been drawn by the developments in the technological world, the emergence of digital technologies towards the concluding decades of the twentieth century as defining paradigms of new age communication raised a whole new set of challenges to copyright regimes. The traditional notions of the basic concepts such as rights of reproduction and distribution have become inadequate and even irrelevant in the digital age. All works can now be digitalized whether they comprise texts, images, sound or diagrams and once digitalized the various elements such as images are all ‘equal’ and can be merged, transformed, manipulated or mixed to create an endless variety of new works. Earlier rights of reproduction

With the advent of the digital environment, the access, use, copy has become really easy. Digital environment has created a platform for people for widespread cost effective distribution of the original works, as well as new tool for controlling content, posing serious threats to the interest of the creator.

Threats posed by the digital environment to the copyrighted work are way too different from that in the normal course of physical world. To counter these threats innumerable techniques have been developed to make digital works difficult to copy, distribute and access without necessary permission. These techniques are covered under the head of Digital Rights Management (DRM).

Digital Right Management includes techniques which have been developed to control duplication, modification and distribution of original works. The authors or the creators of the original works contend that DRM is necessary in order to protect their interest by preventing free copying and distribution of their work. However there are few who support that DRM poses unnecessary hurdles for the public and impeded the way of innovation and creativity by not letting others from being motivated and benefited by the original work.

Some of the DRM techniques are as

However instead of these techniques large number of data is copied and distributed on the digital environment posing adverse effects on the rights of the creators.

Technologies have been developed to protect the content through watermarking, finger printing and tamer proof hardware and software; access control by user ID and password; content use through disabling printing and downloading, copying specified number of times only and restricting copying through originals only.

However, despite comprehensive legislations with regard to the same, regulation of digital content has been far from reality. Before assessing this scenario, another basic question need to be answered, i.e., whether regulation is desired at all. Also, there are several stakeholders in this arrangement, each with their own interests- legal and economic. In order to comprehensively consider the various issues regarding regulation, the interests of different stakeholders need to be