Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a scheme that uses a combination of technologies to protect digital content from unauthorized users. It also determines what you can and cannot do with digital material. Maybe you’ll be allowed to read only a few chapters of an ebook you downloaded. Or maybe you’ll only be able to watch a few selected parts of a video. It all depends on how the content owner has set up the scheme.
DRM is like a lock that prevents you from reading an ebook, listening to music, watching a video, or printing a file if you don’t have the key. The lock is actually a piece of software that scrambles up or encrypts the original content. Only users with the right decryption key — a long, complex sequence of text characters that functions as a powerful password — can unscramble it.
Other interesting terms…
