Despite the recent announcement of “DRM-free” music tracks by Apple and Amazon.com, Digital Rights Management (DRM) is not about to go away. At least, that's the main conclusion of a report, “Digital Rights Management Update,” made available this week by the market research firm In-Stat.

Instead, says In-Stat analyst Mike Paxton, the DRM-free model will likely be viewed as a music industry-only experiment, albeit one that will be closely monitored to see if a viable business model emerges.

Findings of the report include:

• Forensic DRM technologies, which are used to identify actual end-users of digital content, will see much wider use in the future.

• A significant percentage of US consumers remain ignorant about DRM. Over 40 percent of respondents stated to an In-Stat survey that they were not familiar with the term “Digital Rights Management.”

• The number of consumers who are familiar with DRM is nonetheless growing. Forty-five percent of the same survey respondents stated that they had either purchased or used some type of mincluded asedia product with integrated DRM or content protection technology.
  

A DRM-protected file has “rights” associated with it that define how it can be used. For example, according to Microsoft, a “right” may give you permission to play the file on your computer (a play right), burn the file to an audio CD (a burn right), or sync the file to a portable device (a sync right).

In-Stat's 27-page survey, “Digital Rights Management Update,” costs $3,495. Further information is available on the firm's website, here.

---

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.