Does DRM Work?
“DRM … manages access to a resource, such as a movie or music work, according to conferred rights,” Mark Baugher, technical leader in Cisco Systems’ Internet Technologies division, told the E-Commerce Times. However, the technology is still far from foolproof. In fact, Gartner (NYSE: IT) research director Ray Wagner noted that the music industry has failed to come up with a workable standard so far, although it has been trying for a few years. “No digital rights management capability for consumers has ever shown the promise of being absolutely unbreakable, and most of the ones that have come out have been broken relatively quickly,” he told the E-Commerce Times. For example, he said, a little more than a year ago, the industry tried to prevent illegal copying of CDs by making them readable only on a standard CD player and not a computer CD-ROM drive. However, this method was quickly thwarted by the discovery that drawing a circle around the outside of the disk with a black felt-tip m
