Every time someone downloads an eBook and shares it with others, the copyright owner of the book loses revenue because instead of buying the physical book, people are actually sharing it for free. The very nature of the internet makes file sharing easy and monitoring piracy virtually impossible. Therefore, there was an urgent need to find an alternate route to protecting the copyright of digital content. eBook DRM, or Digital Rights Management, thus, came into being.
Digital rights management uses technology to protect the copyright of the content. Basically, with DRM, control of the digital content passes from the content owner to a computer program.
A company may take several routes to DRM. For example, they can block the forwarding of sensitive emails on their servers. Digital publishers can restrict access to copying and printing of their content.
Tags: digital publishing • Digital Rights Management • DRM (Digital Rights Management) • eBook • ebook DRM • Publishers