The 26th IPP Symposium

Digital Rights Management in the Era of Napster

Olin Sibert, VP Strategic Technologies, InterTrust Technologies

The modern digital world, in which computation and communication are (nearly) free and (nearly) unlimited, poses critical new challenges for management of rights and information. For example, there is much hullabaloo today about "the end of intellectual property" (postulating a world where information is completely uncontrolled) and "the end of fair use" (in the opposite world where information is tightly locked up). These and similar apocalytic visions are inspired by an absolutist interpretation of various technologies, whereas in reality, the picture is not so simple and clear-cut. In my talk, I will discuss the concepts and mechanisms of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology and how it can act as a moderating factor in such visions.