Digital rights management

A: Digital rights management (DRM) is a broad term that includes all the processes, policies, and technologies organizations use to control how content creators use and share digital assets. DRM considers intellectual property and copyright laws to protect both content owners and corporations as they distribute and create content.

An essential part of DRM is digital asset management (DAM) — how a business organizes, stores, retrieves, and shares content in its asset library. Digital assets are typically associated with a license that defines terms and duration of use. Organizations need to know if they currently have the rights to use an asset and understand how and where they are allowed to publish it.

A: If you publish or use a digital asset without the correct permissions in place, your organization could face lawsuits and potential legal penalties. Using assets incorrectly can damage your brand reputation and value.

Unfortunately, many brands wait until they’re already in legal trouble to start thinking about how to incorporate DRM into their business strategy. Instead, making DRM a part of your processes and taking advantage of DRM technologies as soon as you begin to work with digital content will protect your business and make workflows easier.

A: Don’t wait to think about digital rights management. Make DRM technology an essential part of your workflows and processes now. Anytime new digital files or digital media come into your organization, immediately input each asset into a DAM platform along with its rights, to prevent unauthorized use. It’s so much more difficult to go back and retroactively attempt to upload that information.

Keeping up with asset expiration is another effective strategy to make sure your team complies with content protection and intellectual property rights. When the licensing agreement for an asset expires, the DAM ensures that the published asset is unpublished and that users can’t edit, publish, or download an expired asset.

A: Managing assets in the digital age involves many moving parts, and every part needs to be compliant with current regulations. Let’s say that you’re publishing a video advertisement for a marketing campaign. Your business may have produced the video, but that video has music, photography, and live talent that all operate under their own licensing agreements and contracts. Individually, each is a copyrighted work. When you publish your ad, there can’t be circumvention of copyright protections for any of these elements. The right DAM operating system makes it much easier to overcome this challenge.

A: Adobe Experience Manager Assets is a great DRM system. This system is built as a single source of truth — a place to store and track all of your organization’s content. When your team needs a piece of digital content, everyone knows where to find it. Alongside the asset are the rights associated with it — no more guessing if an asset is fair use or if you have permission from the copyright holder to publish. This DRM software also uses artificial intelligence (AI) to streamline tuning, tagging, cropping, and distribution.

A: With DRM technologies readily available, more businesses will adopt digital media best practices and incorporate DAM into their strategy. With that technology in place, organizations will be able to implement continuing advancements in automation and AI to manage content organization and publication. In the future, DRM software will be able to manage assets without any human intervention.