Digital rights management in the open seas of blockchain systems By

To understand the complexity of digital rights management, or DRM, one must first understand the DRM challenges of current systems and then the challenges (and opportunities) presented by blockchain technology that prides itself on transparency, data linkage and immutability as some of the main characteristics that lends itself to the trust systems.

With Web 2.0, content creation and dissemination are via a platform that acts as an intermediary and, like any intermediary, has developed business models that monetize the avenues of content distribution, resulting data and metadata. Digital content (movies, images, music, etc.) can be replicated easily, and the platforms create economic moats and control mechanisms to access content with the complicated n-tier design of passwords, authentication, authorization and usage metering.