Digital Rights Management

Digital rights management (DRM) technology provides a way for content creators to make their content more secure before it is distributed by Internet service providers. This encryption covers the properties of the file as well as the audio content, so that information, such as title, author, and rating, is set and made more secure from modification.

With this capability, applications that create content can prevent users from transferring it to another system for playback. This minimizes the potential for users to misuse tools, such as personal jukebox software, with which they can create a digital duplicate of copyrighted work and then illegally distribute it to other systems.

You can use the Microsoft® Windows Media™ Audio Software Development Kit (SDK) to build applications that can play back digitally packaged content. The user can immediately play content created locally if it has not been moved to another computer. If a user downloads a digitally packaged song from a Web site, then the application can also check if a license is available. If not, it can launch a Web browser to connect the user to the license server, thus securing the content.

Controlling the reading and writing of files using DRM is handled by setting attributes. For more information, see the example code in Creating Digitally Encrypted Content, and the attribute names in Windows Media Format SDK Constants.

DRM is a new and exciting technology for use with Microsoft® Windows Media™ Services. For the latest information about DRM, see the Microsoft Web site.

The following topics are covered in this section.

See Also

• IWMMetadataEditor Interface
  
  
• IWMReader Interface
  
  
• IWMWriter Interface
  
  
• Windows Media Device Manager Secure Content Provider Interfaces