DAM and interoperable DRM: Maintaining agility in the world of evolving content ecosystems

The current situation in digital rights management (DRM), particularly DRM interoperability, is described as it relates to the field of digital asset management (DAM). In particular the emergence of a few large “content ecosystems” which have their own specific attributes in DRM and other areas such as business rules is described. While full interoperability of these ecosystems at the consumer level may not happen for many years, interoperability of key back-end infrastructure such as DAM systems is possible and desirable now. A proposal is put forward on how DAM systems should evolve architecturally in such a way as to maximize both their scope of application and their level of content security — and thus their value. It is argued that such evolution is valuable from a product agility perspective even for DAM systems which do not interact with the world of consumer media.