Digital Rights Management (or DRM) is one of these new "Buzz" phrases that  gets passed around. Sometimes people don't fully understand what it exactly is - and why should they? They just want it to work!

So here in a nutshell is a guide to DRM, and how we can provide this for you at little or no cost. - Quite simply, you have video or audio content, you want to protect it, but also allow it's legitimate use -via the internet- to people who you trust, or who have paid for it. But...and this is a very big "but" - you don't want them to "pass" it on to people they trust - without paying you for the privilege!

You'd think that was an impossible request. How can you protect content on the Internet? Well the answer is "quite well thank you", Microsoft have devised their version of DRM which is actually built INTO the Microsoft Media Player (v9 and above). So it is possible to encrypt WMV and WMA (etc.) files, so that other non-compatible players can't understand them, but Media Player can. So when it sees an encrypted file, it will decrypt it and obey the instructions regarding fair use that you have embedded into the file before allowing the file to be played.

So, in the example of a movie, we could say that before you can watch the movie you have to pay for it. Or once you've paid for it you can only watch it 10 times or any number of times but only within 20 days. Or we could just say that any one can watch it for free - if we have given them a password. So the rules are flexible enough to cater for every possible scenario.

Try the sample file on the left - you have to be given a licence to watch it. Try playing it without a licence and then copying it to other PCs after you have a licence.