Objective Seven: Incorporate Digital Rights Management
If one of the requirements for submitting content to DEMML� was that the authors would never receive any remunerations for their work then the quality and variety of content would surely suffer. Therefore one of the lower priority goals of the DEMML� system will be to incorporate digital rights management (DRM) so that authors who choose to do so may charge a fee for the content they have created. There are no plans to incorporate this feature in the first version of the standard. This technology is still currently in flux and it is difficult to incorporate it into existing software. Once a market has been established for DEMML� software the developers will have more and better resources for adding this feature to their software. DEMML� will also present a very different DRM landscape for software developers than other types of content. Most content protected by DRM is completely separate from other DRM protected content. For instance, each song you download is a separate file even though it is from the same album. Any e-book you read is a completely separate file from all of your other e-books. And you only listen to or read one of them at a time. However, DEMML� content is designed to be mixed and matched at the will of the user. A student may be reading an explanation written by one author one second and viewing a video produced by a different author the next, all displayed on the same page. Much additional research needs to be done before deciding the best way to solve these problems.
