Digital Rights Management

Digital Rights Management (DRM) refers to a variety of techniques designed to prevent computerized devices from obeying the wishes of their owners and users, in favor of the wishes of those who created the hardware, software, content, or services used by those devices.

Some forms of DRM are known as copy protection.

Modern DRM schemes usually involve encryption.

Some critics of DRM call it Digital Restrictions Management.

Links

 * Digital rights management
 * Copy protection
 * Write-ups from 4am's best of - Accounts of cracking copy-protected Apple II software. (From the "TEXT" documents at the 4am Collection.)
 * "The Copy Protection Wars" (PC Magazine 1986-01-14, pp. 165-182) - an overview (with human factors) of DRM and DRM-circumvention on the PC platform in the mid-1980s

Commentary and criticism

 * Electronic Frontier Foundation: DRM
 * Free Software Foundation: Digital Restrictions Management and Treacherous Computing
 * Defective by Design
 * DRM.info
 * What happens with Digital Rights Management in the real world?