Although the protection of intellectual property is enshrined in copyright laws there is still a rampant and blatant abuse of these rights thanks to piracy. This form of infringement is taking a toll on digital content, be it PDF documents and files, html, web pages, websites, eLearning courses, portals, images, or even software. The role of Intellectual Property Rights - IPR protection - is therefore to shield digital creative from unauthorized copying, printing, altering and distribution. This can be achieved by relying on protection software to encrypt and embed digital rights management DRM controls into the digital creative. These controls target the authorized users of these digital materials so as to control what they can do with it once it has been decrypted.

The IPR protectionof PDF documents is based on controlling access to the protected documents and their consequent use once access is gained. The PDF protection software first encrypts the whole or portions of the documents so that persons without the authorization licenses cannot access them.

DRM controls are applied for authorized users and they may among other functions work to stop copying, modification, and stop and/or control printing such as the number of prints that can be made. The software can feature a dynamic watermarking capability which displays the details of the person who authorized printing of the protected document. The software may also carry PDF access expiration capability which allows you to automatically revoke access to the document after a certain amount of predetermined time especially for subscription-based documents. For enterprise publishers or authors the DRM software can feature an administrative system which may provide statistics, reports, auditing for the user, system and the document, batch changes, and system backup and restore.

Also available is DRM protection software to safeguard flash/SWF (Adobe flash) files. In this the software seeks to protect the flash file (what the flash player displays) and its underlying source code i.e. the scripts and multimedia objects from being decompiled. IPR protection for flash files is achieved by encrypting the flash file and having it decrypted only in memory. A public key encryption system ensures no passwords are needed.

IPR protection for web content is crucial like never before especially with the emergence of eLearning and online training courses. Lecturers and online schools find that they need to protect their eBooks, web pages, and other contents published on their websites, intranets or extranets, from unauthorized viewing, copying, modifying, printing, saving and distribution. Just like with flash files we need web content protection software to guard both the displayed contents and the subjacent html source codes so we can determine how long content will be used and by who.

Software developers can make use of IPR protection to shield their applications from unauthorized copying and sharing, and to determine for how long they can be used. The protection software works by integrating with the source code in order to provide licensing controls for trial periods or even yearly subscriptions.