Makers of movies, music, and books have plenty to worry about when it comes to digital rights management (DRM). So does everyone else.

From law firms and financial services companies to the health care sector, there are plenty of enterprises that maintain and distribute intellectual property online. And they need to concern themselves with securing this content.

Simply put, DRM is a secure system for protecting the copyrights of digital content distributed online. There are two basic approaches: self-protecting, where encryption is used to control access; and self-describing, where copy-control information is embedded in the content's data stream.

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