Why Access Rights & Encryption cannot Prevent Document Sharing
DRM document rights, access rights & encryption
Access rights were an important development in the mainframe computer era. Access rights started by preventing you writing to a magnetic tape, and improved to reserving the type of access rights you had. But if you had read access you could make a copy of the file. So access rights did not go very far to prevent document sharing.
So to prevent document sharing you need to do something extra. DRM document rights have to be something different from document access rights.
Some people try to prevent document sharing by using document encryption. Document encryption is a valuable technique because it prevents document sharing if you do not have the decryption key. But what document encryption does not do is create DRM document rights.
If you look at document encryption software (look at the ArticSoft or the PGP web sites as examples) what they do is take a document and encrypt it. That’s it! There is nothing about stopping valid recipients from copying, document sharing, printing and so on. So although document encryption software can restrict who can use documents (although there is nothing to prevent people from sharing document encryption keys, and therefore document sharing) it does nothing to prevent document sharing.
So anyone who can decrypt the document can share it (and also alter it, perhaps without detection). So even a combination of access rights and document rights does not prevent document sharing.
DRM document rights combine access rights, document encryption and document rights, together with additional controls that work to prevent document sharing or reduce the desire of users to allow document sharing for documents they are linked to. Personalising document rights with watermarking on viewed or printed images encourages users to avoid document sharing for photographed or printed material. Restricting the number of times documents can be printed or seen is an improvement over access rights, because it is not an all or nothing control. Document rights are absolute, but DRM document rights can be variable, granular and changeable to suit the rights a publisher wishes to grant.
Access rights and encryption are not enough to prevent document sharing. But they are a base on which, if correctly implemented, DRM document rights can be used to prevent document sharing.
Download document rights management software
Download document rights management software that uses digital rights management (DRM) controls and US Government approved AES 256 bit encryption to prevent unauthorized use and misuse of your documents and enable secure document sharing.
With Locklizard document rights management software you can control access to your documents, what users can do with them (copy, print, etc.), and when they can no longer be viewed (expire). You can even add dynamic watermarks (username, company, date/time stamp) that are applied when your documents are viewed and/or printed. Locklizard document rights management software provides secure document sharing with document management, copy protection, and copy control.
