Overview of DRM technologies

Pataki Máté <>
MTA SZTAKI

Pataki Balázs <>
MTA SZTAKI

Tóth Zoltán <>
MTA SZTAKI

Pallinger Péter <>
MTA SZTAKI

Kovács László <>
MTA SZTAKI

Protection against copyright infringement, or in a broader sense Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a rather comprehensive topic, as it has legal, business, social and, of course, technological aspects as well. In the project called “Innovative e-commerce marketplace system and terminal” MTA SZTAKI Department of Distributed Systems examined in detail a number of different DRM solutions, their usage range, usability, advantages and disadvantages. Our research resulted in interesting though contradictious conclusions that we are ready to share with Networkshop participants.

We examined the following three aspects of Digital Rights Management:

  1. legal, theoretical, technological background
  2. DRM procedures and systems in practice
  3. testing DRM solutions
Besides talking about DRM procedures relevant to digital books, audio and video materials, we also discuss analogue DRM solutions and the instances when such procedures – even though disliked by many – are worth applying. We also discuss the instances when such procedures are not worth being used or when using them are against the law.