V-Team blog by the people behind V-Rooms

What is Digital Rights Management (DRM) for Documents?

In today’s digital world, when we speak of documents, we mean information that used to start out as a piece of paper but now most often ends up in an electronic format like PDF. Documents, as opposed to image files (although documents may contain graphics or images) or emails, are in a format that is intended to be viewed online and possibly printed. Some examples of digital documents are legal contracts, market research papers, financial statements and newsletters.

However, there are numerous challenges associated with the distribution of digital document. The reasons to distribute documents in digital or electronic form are obvious. However, many business users are understandably reluctant to send confidential or sensitive documents outside of their company’s firewall. In unencrypted form, these digital documents are easily copied and forwarded to potential competitors or others who do not have the company’s best interest at heart.

Merely applying document passwords doesn’t enhance security because the passwords are often tied to the document itself, and may be shared along with the copy. The practice of issuing unique passwords to many documents and users becomes a logistical and administrative nightmare. 

Adding to the security concern is the complex landscape of users who receive and view documents.  Just a few years ago, a business user could safely assume that the majority of its users were on some type of Microsoft Windows system on a personal computer. In today’s environment, users are accessing documents on Mac and Linux platforms, using Safari and Firefox instead of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and sometimes need to see documents on their mobile devices in addition to their home laptop computer.  This is in addition to accessing documents on their desktop at work.  Supporting all of these uses, while maintaining proper document security, is indeed a difficult and challenging task.