Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Digital Asset Management (DAM)

DAM consists of management tasks related to storage, retrieval and distribution of digital assets. It also refers to the protocol for downloading, renaming, rating, grouping, maintaining and exporting files. The media asset management (MAM) mainly addresses audio, video and animation.

DAM system comprises of computer hardware and software systems that help in the process of digital asset management.

Types of Digital Asset Management Systems

1.       Production asset management systems

It focuses on managing assets as they are created for a digital media production viz. animation, 3D movie, video game. They usually include work-flow and project-management features integrated with the storage organization and revision control of changing digital assets.

2.       Brand asset management systems

Focus of these systems is on facilitation of content reuse within the organization. The type of content it deals with is sales or marketing related. For example: logos, fonts and product images.

3.       Library asset management systems

These systems focus on storage and retrieval of infrequently changing media assets like video or photo archiving.

4.       Digital supply chain services push the digital content out to digital retailers (e.g.  video, music and game)

DAM Vendors

DAM systems are being offered by various vendors in the market. DAM software may be free open source or proprietary.

Open source software:

Resourcespace: It is a php based solution uses MySql as a backend.

www.resourcespace.org

Proprietary software:

http://digitalmedia.opentext.com/

http://www.widen.com/

http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/cm/cmgr/mp/edition-enterprise.html

Digital Rights Management (DRM)

DRM is a method of controlling access to copyrighted material in available digital format. In other words, DRM is a shield around the digital content like videos and music to stop privacy. It is a digital management of rights.

In order to design and implement DRM systems, the following two architectures to be considered:

1). Functional Architecture

This covers the high-level modules of DRM system that together provide an end-to-end management of rights.

The DRM system can be modeled in three areas:

a). Intellectual Property (IP) Asset Creation and Capture This module manage the creation of content so it can be easily traded and includes asserting rights when content is first created.

b). IP Asset Management

To manage and enable the trade of content.

c). IP Asset Usage

To manage the usage of content once it has been traded.

These models needs to be complemented by the functional architecture that provides the framework for the modules to implement DRM functionality.

 2). Information Architecture

This covers the modeling of entities within the DRM system as well as their relationships.

DRM Vendors

Below are the some of the DRM vendors

Microsoft

Real Network

Macrovision

IBM

Seclore

Seclore - Information Rights Management
Seclore FileSecure’s IRM connector for IBM FileNet®  empower enterprises with the ability to robustly secure and monitor access to content and information within and outside of IBM FileNet® without any compromise to collaboration and way people work.
 
http://www.seclore.com/ibm_filenet.html

DRM from IBM

IBM has developed two solutions to enforce DRM at low level:

a). DRM-JVM

In this solution digital rights management has been enforced at Java virtual machine(JVM) level. DRM-JVM does not affect the non DRM solutions.

b). WebGuard

This solution enforces copyrights at the browser level.