Digital Rights Management (DRM) was a concept that evolved in the mid to late 1980s as a means of securing artifact copyright in the digital era.
I was exposed to early attempts at DRM earlier than this, as PC software vendors struggled to prevent unlicensed copying of software programs. The attempts, involving the spending of increasingly larger amounts of money on increasingly complex copy-protection schemes, were largely unsuccessful. Nerds and hackers love nothing better than a large business stating confidently “our copy protection scheme is unbreakable”. That’s like waving a red flag in front of an angry bull, or red meat in front of a pride of lions. Once the hackers had done their jobs, the copy protection schemes were mostly circumvented, and the end of the attempts came when PC software prices fell to a point where the RoI for illegal copying became unfavorable.
This article explains the history of what is now known as DRM. It’s a long story.
