Freedam

Digital Rights Management (DRM)

Also called DRM

Digital rights management (DRM) is the set of methods used to control what may be done with digital content: who may use it, where, how, and for how long. The term covers two different practices. In media distribution, DRM means technical copy protection, such as e-books, films and music that only open in an authorised app. In a digital asset management system, it means recording the licence terms of each asset and enforcing them when people view, download, share or publish it.

Updated

Copy protection and rights management

Copy protection Rights management in a DAM
Goal Stop buyers copying or redistributing content Keep the organisation's use of each asset within its licence
Who it controls Consumers of films, e-books and music Employees, agencies, partners
How Encryption, licence keys, device limits Licence terms stored as data and checked on each action
Where it applies In the player or reader app In the library, share links, portals and publishing channels
After download The file stays locked The file is an ordinary file, so the check has to happen before download

Circumventing technical copy protection is illegal in many countries, for example under 17 U.S.C. § 1201 in the United States and Article 6 of the EU Directive 2001/29/EC. For marketing assets, which are made to be published, the second kind of DRM is the one that matters.

What rights management records

  • Permissions: the actions allowed, such as display, reproduce, distribute, publish or modify.
  • Constraints: the conditions on those permissions, such as territory, channel, start date and end date.
  • Prohibitions: actions that are never allowed, such as resale, broadcast or use as AI training data.
  • Duties: obligations attached to a use, such as crediting the photographer, applying a watermark, notifying the owner or paying a fee.
  • Evidence: the contract, licence and releases the terms come from. See usage rights.

Machine-readable rights with ODRL

A licence term written as prose ("may be used on web channels in Europe until June 2027") depends on someone reading it. Stored as structured data, the same term can be checked by software each time someone tries to use the asset.

The Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) Information Model 2.2, a W3C Recommendation published in 2018, is the standard format for this. An ODRL policy lists permissions, prohibitions and duties, each with constraints a system can evaluate. A policy for a campaign photo might grant permission to distribute, limited to the European Union and to web and social channels, until 30 June 2027, with a duty to credit the photographer and a prohibition on resale.

Where rights are checked

Rights management only works if the check happens at each point where an asset leaves the library or is changed:

  • downloads, in every size;
  • creating a share link or adding the asset to a portal;
  • publishing to a website or another external channel;
  • editing or creating derivatives, including AI edits;
  • bulk actions, where one restricted asset must be blocked or removed from the batch.

Digital rights management in Freedam

  • Rights policies are stored as ODRL 2.2 JSON-LD, with permissions, prohibitions, duties, and constraints on territory, channel and date. A constraint the system cannot evaluate does not grant the action.
  • Policies are checked when someone downloads an asset, creates a share link, edits it with AI, or when a publication channel publishes it. A blocked bulk download or share names the assets that were blocked.
  • Duties are applied: a watermark duty makes downloads watermarked, and a publication channel only publishes assets whose duties it can meet.
  • Share links check the policy each time they are opened, so assets that are no longer allowed drop out of existing links.
  • A policy can require an acknowledgement before download, with the text translated per language. When the terms change, people accept the new version.
  • The rights log records blocked actions, acknowledgements and downloads, with territory, channel and decision. It can be filtered and exported as CSV.
  • Access control works alongside rights policies: access rules decide who can see an asset, and the policy decides what may be done with it. The rights and compliance page gives an overview.

Frequently asked questions

No. Copyright is the creator's legal right over a work. DRM is the set of tools and records used to control how content is used, whether the organisation owns the copyright or holds a licence.

What is ODRL?

ODRL (Open Digital Rights Language) is a W3C standard for expressing permissions, prohibitions and obligations as machine-readable data. Rights systems use it so that licence terms can be stored, exchanged and evaluated automatically.

Does a DAM need copy-protection DRM?

Rarely, for marketing assets. Brand teams need to know which uses each licence allows and to block the others. For confidential pre-release material, watermarked previews, limited download sizes and share links with an expiry date are the usual protections.

Related terms

Nordi

See rights enforced on every file

Nordi's demo library has a rights library: open an asset, read its usage terms and expiry, and see which downloads and shares its policy allows.

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