Data Rights Management is a technology that creates and enforces certain conditions about how digital media files — such as PDF, Words, Excel — can be used and shared.

It prevent someone from copying or printing or editing of your work to others.

Why DRM – Data Rights Management

In the past ten years, copying and re-printing a physical book was non-trivial. If you wanted to steal someone else’s work you needed to find someone who was willing to publish the copy. So there were some really obvious physical controls in the physical print industry.

But the digital age has spawned the ability – the computer – to make copies at near zero cost, and to do so without detection. The use of web sites to facilitate pirated film, music and PDF documents demonstrates that the ability to copy works that do not have data rights management applied to them is unlimited and files can be shared and transmitted without any control at all.

Data rights management is a critical feature if you are making confidential information available to others, whether it is a price list, a contract specification, an analyst’s report or technical drawing. Without DRM you have no way of preventing people who have access to your intellectual property from doing just exactly what they want with it. So that’s why it is important.

How could DRM helps?

Data Rights Management enables content owner to control not only who receives their content but what they can do with it.

Such controls include:

• Preventing editing and saving
  
• Preventing copy to local workstation
  
• Preventing printing (or limiting the number of prints available)
  
• Preventing screen capture
  
• Document expiry
  
• Watermarking documents

DATA RIGHTS MANAGEMENT