What is digital rights management and how does it work?

The purpose of digital rights management is to protect digital content and associated revenue for rights holders. Digital rights management works by encrypting content and then ensuring users meet certain conditions in order to decrypt it.

A digital rights management (DRM) system, using a secret key, encrypts content to make it unwatchable so that only somebody who has the key can decrypt and watch it. But that key, like all digital information, is easy to copy and share so on its own it is not sufficient to protect the content.

There are a number of different uses of DRM, meaning that DRM technology is very flexible and can be used to create a great variety of usage policies. The same DRM principles apply for any kind of video-enabled devices including smartphones, computers, tablets and gaming consoles. DRM systems can also protect non-audio visual assets such as software, bytecodes, eBooks, and more.