I know the hurdles and the sleepless nights involved in coding an app or a software may be for mobile phones or computers. And what is more important is that the journey doesn’t even end here after completing the software there are many other hurdles still left like marketing the software and providing customer service and constantly developing your software. It is thus a process that takes a lot of time and resources. And even after that when we see our software on online sites being shared for free and undermining all our efforts, that is truly frustrating for all developers. I think we have now come to a conclusion that preventing piracy is almost impossible for most apps, still developers are constantly trying out new ways to prevent piracy and some have even succeeded more than others. Android for example when compared with Apple’s portable devices has completely failed to prevent piracy but in iPhones it is impossible to install pirated apps without jail breaking.
DRM or Digital Rights Management are various technologies and algorithms used to prevent piracy of copyrighted work. It controls the use, modification, and distribution of copyrighted media and prevents it from being used by unauthorized personnel. Although its usage to protect copyrighted material is widely accepted but some argue that it only serves as a hindrance and causes inconvenience to actual customers having legitimate product. They also argue that it prevents us from exercising our legal rights of backing up, lending out through library, accessing in public domain of copyrighted materials.
DRM may be implemented either by restricting access to copyrighted material by requiring a specific license or access code. Another used to implement DRM is through scrambling of copyrighted data and embedding it with tags. DRM technology is an emerging one and is nowadays used by many big companies like Ubisoft.
The Wonderful World of Algorithms 