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DRM 101: Digital Rights Management in a wireless world.

Article Excerpt
Mobile devices are fast becoming the means by which we can extend the reach of our communication and entertainment channels. With this new mobility of media, producers of digital content are facing a new challenge: how to protect their content against unauthorized use.

Every day new mobile devices hit the market--telephones, PDAs, and various hybrids. With each new generation comes increased processing power and storage facilities. These mobile devices are no longer primarily communication tools, which is why they come with all the processing power and storage facilities. Instead, they are fast becoming the means by which we can extend the reach of our communication and entertainment channels.

We already see portable devices for music listening, video viewing, and game playing. These machines require an external uploading or storage mechanism--CD, DVD, game packs, or memory cards. New mobile devices give us access to the Internet while on the go, providing a way to download content to the mobile device, and eliminating the need for external uploading capabilities. These mobile devices also use movable storage, such as memory sticks or flash cards, giving us the ability to transfer downloaded content to the entertainment machines that we already own.

With this new mobility of media, producers of digital content are facing a new challenge. Since the inception of digital content, they have struggled with the problem of protecting their content against unauthorized use.

We've seen numerous breaches of the copyright protection of media--CD ripping, peer-to-peer sharing networks, breaking of DVD protections, and more. The problem of unauthorized sharing could be greatly reduced if the industry enabled consumers to use their purchased media legally in different contexts. The field of Digital Rights Management (DRM) holds the solution to this problem. Digital rights define the legal usage policies for digital content, while DRM enables the transfer of rights from one person/device to another person/device. With the emergence of new, advanced mobile devices, the time to introduce DRM into the wireless world is now, to get ahead of the curve and avoid the unauthorized use now rampant in the wired world.

The fundamental...

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