Cross Platform Digital Rights Management (CP-DRM) System

The explosive growth of digital storage, transport, and processing technologies has allowed for enormous advances in the way that information is created, accessed, and disseminated. Thus, sensitive information that used to be kept under physical lock-and-key is now quite often left completely unprotected within general-purpose computer systems. Recent commercial implementations of Digital Rights Management (DRM) software have attempted to provide security measures needed for the protection of sensitive digital information. Unfortunately, most of these have either proven to be too weak for adequate data protection or require a level of operational restrictions that makes them unsuitable for general-purpose use. Pikewerks has spent the past six months developing a prototype Cross-Platform Digital Rights Management (CP- DRM) capability which allows for the transparent protection of both static and dynamic information (such as Office documents, spreadsheets, audio and video files) while also retaining centralized control over the information’s access, modification, distribution, and usage rights. Instead of limiting data protection to static file playback within a limited set of trusted software applications, Pikewerks is creating an extensible, feature-rich, and user-transparent DRM system that works seamlessly with existing applications across several major operating systems.