Digital Rights Management (DRM)
Digital Rights Management (or DRM for short) is the term applied to the protection of digital assets using a centralized rights management service. In the Drumlin system these assets are PDF documents - books, reports, technical manuals, training materials and more...
The Drumlin DRM service uses AUTHORIZATION CODES (authcodes) as its principal means of asset management (see diagram, below). Authcodes are 20 character text strings that relate to a specific secure PDF (a DRMX file) or packaged DRMX file (an EXE file). Each authcode is unique and is stored in a table on the DRM server together with the identity (DocID) of the PDF document it relates to, a usage count which is generally set to 1 but can be any value>0, and decrements by 1 if it is used (when it reaches 0 it is no longer available). Although not generally enabled, authcodes can also be made specific to individual registered users (via a UserID field entry). Authcodes are created and managed by Drumlin Security and may be ordered via thestoreand byemailing uswith a request for codes. Emails must specify the Document for which codes are required, the number of codes required, and the Drumlin userID of the person requesting them. Codes are supplied as text files and are only issued to the person who created the files originally.
"Basic DRM" files do not require authorization codes, but can be made user-specific via the UserLists facility. In this case the identify of users who have permission to view the document is included in encrypted form within the document itself. All such users must be existing Drumlin service users, so have pre-installed and registered the Drumlin reader software and have unique UserIDs assigned to them. These IDs are required for the creation of user-specific DRM files. When secure PDFs in the form of DRM or DRMX files are used, Drumlin tracks their creation and usage via a server-based Activity Log and locally on the end user's PC. Authorization events are logged, as are failed attempts.
Javelin "Click and Go" EXE files, which are fully secured DRMX files packaged with the Drumlin Javelin reader do require authorization (standard option, "online authorization"), but do not require software installation or registration. For this reason usage of such files is not tracked, although usage of the authcodes involved is tracked. Options for "offline authorization" and "no authorization" are also provided.
The Drumlin Digital Rights Management (DRM) Server is comprised of a Microsoft Windows server host configuration offering Web hosting, ASP/.NET and SQLServer 5 (or later) facilities. Service management is conducted via FTP and SQLServer management facilities. In the latter case this is typically Microsoft SQLServer Management Studio (or Studio Express) and Microsoft Access (connection via ODBC to SQLServer host). The latter is principally of use for ad hoc queries and management report generation, but may also be used for data updating where appropriate. The SQLServer configuration may be shared with many other databases and is typically very lightly loaded. This is because the data stored is fairly small (normally no documents are stored in the database, just document and user related data), and interaction between the client and host server is typically occasional, short and fast. Almost the only occasion where larger volumes of data are handled is when a large bulk publishing exercise is run (e.g. for 100s of files at one go)
