Who invented DRM digital rights management?

Answer 1

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a generic term that covers many types of protective measures used to prevent the copying and distribution of digital media. As such no individual or company invented DRM.

Copyright holders have always sought means to control the illicit copying and distribution of their products. With the arrival of digital media it was possible for users to create perfect copies of the media and so many companies devised schemes to prevent copying. The earliest forms of DRM, from around 1996, limited the use of the physical disc that held the digital media. Film companies imposed a Content Scrambling System to films released on DVD and record companies, most notably Sony, introduced CDs that secretly installed software on a users computer to prevent the duplication of the CD. This software only worked on computers running the Windows operating system and was found to compromise the security of the computer. It has since been abandoned.

With the coming of the internet it became increasingly easy to illicitly duplicate and then distribute media files and a system of protecting individual files was created first by Microsoft with their Windows Media DRM in 1999. When Apple launched the iTunes store in 2003 the record companies insisted on a DRM system to protect their material and so Apple added their FairPlay DRM to files supplied from the iTunes store. Apple has since convinced the record companies this was a bad idea and has dropped the use of DRM protection from the music files.