Digital Rights Management DRM

Digital Rights Management (DRM)
“A system for protecting the copyright of digital data by enabling secure distribution and/or disabling illegal distribution of the data. Typically, a DRM system protects intellectual property by either enctypting the data so that it can only be accessed by authorized users or marking the content with a watermark or similar method so that the content can not be freely distributed.”

Interesting subject when you start to go into it.
I had read about it but hadn’t taken much notice until a conversation I had with someone made me dig a bit deeper.
The worry was that someone could send a document with DRM embedded that we would store and it would then be unreadable at a later date due to a deletion or expiry date in the DRM setting.
It may not be quite that bad as yet because I understand that you need to be registered and have to accept the DRM policy.
But there might be a need for some user awareness here as I am not sure that a user couldn’t accept a DRM document by registering their email address and accepting the policy without us knowing about it.
There seems to be 5 players in this market, Microsoft, Adobe, EMC, Oracle and Liquid M/C.
If anybody has any more information or can provide more clarification, would be worth sharing otherwise it is one to watch particularly in the Vista and beyond territory.