September 2003
Take Control of Confidential Content
by Penny Lunt
In April, Madonna lashed back at peer-to-peer network users who were downloading free versions of songs from her CD by loading P2P networks with dummy MP3 files. Instead of her songs, would-be pirates received an unladylike recorded warning from the pop diva. Then in June, Senator Orrin Hatch suggested that law enforcers be allowed to destroy the home computers of P2P network users to prevent copyright infringements.
Clearly, digital rights issues stir up strong emotions among content creators and those fruitlessly trying to curtail the free distribution of copyrighted material. Similar issues are filtering into the corporate world, causing the same kind of unease. Companies are starting to rein in the distribution of their intellectual property via email and other avenues on the Internet.
Large organizations clearly need to share documents and data with authorized employees, partners and customers, yet sensitive information must be protected from unauthorized users. Further, authorized users must be prevented from forwarding, printing and changing content in unauthorized ways.
When important information is leaked, a company can sustain damage in several ways: Its market capitalization and stock price can drop, its reputation can suffer, its competitive advantage can be diminished, and revenues can take a hit.
"Say chips are designed by one company and manufactured by a contract manufacturer," says Joshua Duhl, research director of rich media, content management and retrieval at IDC, Framingham, MA. "What happens if a design winds up in the hands of competitors? The bottom line is, a company's revenue and reputation can be affected."
Another risk to intellectual property arises when employees are terminated. "An employee may have, over the course of his or her employment, downloaded information to a PC or a USB device," Duhl notes. "How do you protect the company and its assets from disgruntled employees?"
Many of the document management, content management and digital asset management products we write about in Transform provide a partial answer to the digital rights management (DRM) challenge: They let creators and administrators assign access and editing permissions to content. Yet once a document or digital asset has been sent out via email, that control is lost.
Encryption software can protect the transmission of a document, but once it's opened at the other end, you have no governance over it.
Digital rights management software or digital rights policy management software lets you assign view, print, copy and edit rights to content based on corporate or department policies or the author's preference. More importantly, DRM-assigned rights perpetuate after a document has been emailed or otherwise released outside of the company. In most cases, centralized, server-based DRM systems let you make changes to rights and permissions on the fly, so a partner who is no longer working on a project or an ex-employee could be denied access to sensitive information. Some DRM programs even let you program time outs, such that your quarterly report will expire at the end of the quarter, for example.
DRM software typically assigns policy-based rights to content. Accounts payable documents, for example, could be restricted to people in the accounting department, and printing and editing rights could be limited to the appropriate financial officers.
Some DRM programs integrate with popular desktop and enterprise applications. When a user tries to open a document or piece of data, the client application contacts a rights management server that manages identifications, roles and permissions, to find out and control what the person may do with the file. If the email application has been integrated with the DRM system, then rights persist via email, limiting what both sender and recipient may do with the content therein or attached.
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