Cynthia Sebatina 5 October 2021

Categories Content

Overcome Content Protection Challenges by Implementing a Digital Rights Management Solution

In today’s digital world, digital rights management (DRM) is increasingly important as it allows publishers or authors to control what paying users can do with their works. With the rise in online publishing, DRM adds a protective barrier to your digital assets to prevent unauthorized access.

In today’s digital world, digital rights management (DRM) is increasingly important as it allows publishers or authors to control what paying users can do with their works. With the rise in online publishing, DRM adds a protective barrier to your digital assets to prevent unauthorized access.

For businesses, implementing digital rights management systems or processes can help to prevent unauthorized use and ensure secure distribution of digital learning content thereby protecting the intellectual property rights of authors, publishers, and other content owners. Hence proving, DRM is playing a growing role in data security.

Here is a list of DRM features to ensure content protection and security:

Lack of Security Against Protecting Digital Content

Content can be the source of revenue for many businesses including publishers, societies and associations, providers of eLearning solutions and organizations whose business models revolve around the digital contents, and content-oriented organizations.

Whether the revenue stream comes from direct sales of ebooks, journals, articles, training videos, paid memberships or subscriptions, these digital assets and resources need to be protected and controlled from unauthorized access. If left unprotected, they can easily be re-shared, printed, copied, or illegally distributed, and thus losing out on the ownership and potential revenue permanently.

Secure Your Data with AES-256 Encryption

AES-256 encryption provides a multi-level security layer that safeguards your content by limiting access to the same and restricting user actions. (e.g., copying, downloading, etc.).

DRM protects your digital assets in both online and offline content delivery models.

• Accessing content in offline mode – In the case of offline use of the content, the downloaded contents are saved in an encrypted format within the Apps locally on the end device of the user. To ensure the security of the data, each time the content is accessed by an end-user, the content is decrypted and is encrypted back when the end-user closes the content in the Apps. This feature allows the users to access all offline content unusable outside the Impelsys Apps
• Accessing content in online mode – When the user is accessing the content while he is connected to the internet, the transmission of the digital content takes place in an encrypted format. This makes the content inaccessible to unauthorized users.

Intellectual Property Theft and Cyber Attacks

Intellectual property (IP) encompasses a whole gamut of content. As content distribution models change, cybercriminals are developing more sophisticated attacks to gain access to data, content, and valuable intellectual property. Whether it’s a patent, copyrighted content, training or educational materials, market reports, it’s intellectual property and it needs to be protected, controlled, and tracked.

Complete control from a variety of document control and DRM policies to prevent Cyber Attacks and protect Intellectual Property (IP)  –

• Restrict copying of content – DRM controls ensure content cannot be copied or distributed – the admin retains full control over access and users at all times.
• Restrict or prevent users from printing the content – You can selectively allow your content to be printed based on the permitted page-range, percentage of total pages, number of pages, etc.
• Provide control access – Allow users to access your protected content through a custom-built secure portal to prevent all sorts of unauthorized access and leaks.
• Enable/disable JavaScript – Provide JavaScript Execution Privileges for the users. JavaScript allows controlling the elements of a web application responsive to the user. Users can enable it, disable it, or manage exceptions as required.

One Size Fits Subscription Model vs Multi-Tiered Subscriptions

As the market expands, many businesses that have traditionally offered a one-time ‘forever’ purchase are switching to selling subscriptions, whether monthly, annually or for a specified time period.

A one-size-fits-all product does not apply any longer. Today, the user appreciates that they are charged only according to their usage, which in turn motivates them to use the platform more. Further, the need to manage multiple features can be leveraged by customizing the product as per the customer’s need.

Tailoring Your own Flexible Business Model

By implementing a DRM solution, you can customize and tailor your subscription periods depending on the requirement. It allows the platform tenants to get flexibility to administer different subscription period for the same content for different customers, depending on the subscription plans they have opted for.

Our solution allows the content owners to sell their content as part of a subscription model with a time-based restriction that provides access control to the content to coincide with the subscription period.

Unauthorized Access

The increasing use of ecommerce in digital assets makes the privacy problem even more acute. The ease of processing, obtaining, and transmitting digital content has led to many incidents where published works or proprietary content has been stolen, resulting in detrimental losses.

Licensing controls to authorize users and devices:

1. Content Control – Provides complete control of the content by restricting access to pages/journals for the users, specific user roles or to logged out users. Facilitates content visibility restriction based on login.
2. Role-based access control – Restrict content access to specific users, to all users in your company, or just those that have been granted access to a specific set of documents depending on their roles. Restricting content access to a specific user ensures your content cannot be used by an unauthorized user and hence minimizes the risk of confidential digital content being compromised.
3. Lock access – Restrict access to articles/journals to logged in/out users or specific user roles.
4. Content Visibility Restriction – Control the visibility of the content by selecting who can view – (everyone, logged out users, logged in users, specific user roles) depending on the requirement.
5. Expiry Control – Gain complete control of expiry dates for access to your digital assets.
6. Share Control – Restrict distribution and duplication of your digital content.
7. Block Screenshots – Stop users taking high-quality screenshots using screen grabbing tools.
8. Device & concurrent usage locking – Provides control on the number of devices for each user. This feature can be leveraged to limit the number of concurrent usage on the number of devices, users, or products.
9. Pre-set expiry dates for access – Allows the Admin to set an expiry date on the document or media, after which the user will no longer be able to access it – irrespective of being online/offline.
10. Authentication and location security – Control the devices and locations the documents can be accessed from. DRM allows the admin to set lock access to resources based on their IP addresses, locations, or devices.
11. Revoke access for any user – The admin can revoke documents and/or user access and take corrective actions instantly, the moment there is a hint of a breach.

Risks of Sharing Passwords

Although passwords could protect the content from gaining unauthorized access. However, passwords can still easily be shared with others and open the gate to anyone with whom that password is shared, hence creating a serious threat.

Security controls offered:

• No passwords or logins are required for users to access the content. The system automatically checks the user permission based on user-Id and allows access to the authorized devices. Hence, users cannot share access information, and therefore the confidential documents with others.
• Content is only ever decrypted in memory hence no insecure temporary files are created.
• To ensure 100% security, DRM controls are part of the content and cannot be removed.

Here at Impelsys, we’ve created a DRM solution that is feature-rich and provides hassle-free content security. Scholar 2.0 has a full suite of encryption, access control, permissions, expiry, and file tracking in a single, complete document security solution.

To know more contact Impelsys for your content protection and DRM needs at marketing@impelsys.com.