Document Security Solutions – Encryption, DLP, ERM, IRM, DRM

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Choosing the right Document Security.

Abraham Maslow said in 1966, “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”  And that is disturbingly true for most of us – especially product manufacturers who want to sell the security silver bullet (aka snake oil) to cure all ills.

So if you want to ‘secure’ a document, immediately four types of security vendor will be extolling their virtues and wares: Data Leakage Prevention (DLP), Encryption, Digital Rights Management (DRM) and Enterprise Rights Management (ERM) or Information Rights Management (IRM). Read more

DRM, Copyright Protection and the DMCA

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DRM & the Protection of digital information.

Who says lightning never strikes twice in the same place?  They are wrong.  On the same day it is reported that HP have included new Digital Rights Management (DRM) in their printers to make them refuse to work with ‘foreign’ cartridges, and Claims are made that DRM restrictions lead customers to illegal activity.

Lest we forget, HP have had chips on their cartridges for some time now that decide when the cartridge is empty and if the new cartridge is ‘genuine’ but I’m not convinced by the argument that DRM is being used is correct. Read more

Document Watermarking

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Watermarks for document security.

Watermarking is quite an old technique, appearing to start in the 13th century when it identified the papermaker or the trade guild manufacturing the paper.  So right from the beginning it was about preventing forgery and identifying the source of the paper.  The Gutenberg Bible was watermarked. Read more

Document Expiry using DRM controls

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Using DRM to expire documents

At the risk of stating the obvious, not all PDF documents are supposed to last forever.

It would be nice if books, fiction or non-fiction, had that ability.  But many historic works have been lost for all time because the library they were in was burned down (this problem still goes on today). Read more