Digital rights management from wikipedia

Digital rights management (DRM) is an umbrella term that refers to access control technologies used by publishers and copyright holders to limit usage of digital media or devices. It may also refer to restrictions associated with specific instances of digital works or devices. To some extent, DRM overlaps with copy protection, but DRM is usually applied to creative media (music, films, etc.) whereas copy protection typically refers to software.
The use of digital rights management has been controversial. Advocates argue it is necessary for copyright holders to prevent unauthorized duplication of their work to ensure continued revenue streams.Opponents, such as The Free Software Foundation, maintain that the use of the word "rights" is misleading and suggest that people instead use the term digital restrictions management. Their position is essentially that copyright holders are attempting to restrict use of copyrighted material in ways not included in the statutory, common law, or Constitutional grant of exclusive commercial use to them. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, and other opponents, also consider DRM schemes to be anti-competitive practices.


Introduction

Digital rights management technologies attempt to control use of digital media by preventing access, copying or conversion by end users to other formats. Long before the arrival of digital or even electronic media, copyright holders, content producers, or other financially or artistically interested parties had business and legal objections to copying technologies. Examples include: player piano rolls early in the 20th century, audio tape recording, and video tape recording (e.g. the "Betamax case" in the U.S.). Copying technology thus exemplifies a disruptive technology.
Digital media have vastly increased the scope of these concerns. While analog media inevitably loses quality with each copy generation, and in some cases even during normal use, digital media files may be duplicated an unlimited number of times with no degradation in the quality of subsequent copies. The advent of personal computers as household appliances and the sheer ease of ripping media files from CDs or from radio broadcasts, combined with the internet and popular file sharing tools, has made unauthorized distribution of copies of copyrighted digital files (often referred to as digital piracy) much easier. In effect, virtually any end user or consumer with an Internet connection is a potential node in a distribution network.
Although technical controls on the reproduction and use of software have been intermittently used since the 1970s, the term 'DRM' has come to primarily mean the use of these measures to control copyrightable (eg, artistic) content.[citation needed] Some observers claim that certain DRM technologies enable publishers to enforce access policies that not only prevent copyright violations, but also prevent legal fair use.
While DRM is most commonly used by the entertainment industry (e.g. film and recording), it has found use in other situations as well. Many online music stores, such as Apple's iTunes Store, as well as certain e-book publishers, have adopted various DRM strategies. In recent years, a number of television producers have begun demanding implementation of DRM measures to control access to the content of their shows in connection with the popularity of time-shifting digital video recorder systems such as TiVo.