Information Rights Management (IRM)

During the AIIM’s ERM course, I talk about Digital Rights Management (DRM).  I recently was asked about IRM, and you may find what I found interesting.

The purpose of IRM and its limitations:

Information Rights Management (IRM) allows individuals and administrators to specify access permissions to documents, workbooks, and presentations.  This helps prevent sensitive information from being printed, forwarded, or copied by unauthorized people.  After permission for the file has be restricted by using IRM, the access and usage restrictions are enforced no matter where the information is, because the permission to a file is stored in the document file itself.

IRM helps individuals enforce their personal preferences concerning the transmission of personal or private information.  IRM also helps organizations enforce corporate policy governing the control and dissemination of confidential or proprietary information.

IRM helps to do the following:

• Prevent an authorized recipient of restricted content from forwarding, copying, modifying, printing, faxing, or pasting the content for unauthorized use.
• Prevent restricted content from being copied by using the Print Screen feature in Microsoft Windows.
• Restrict content wherever it is sent.
• Support file expiration so that content in documents can n longer be viewed after a specified period of time.
• Enforce corporate policies that govern the use and dissemination of content within the company.

IRM can’t prevent the following:

• Content from being erased, stolen, or captured and transmitted by malicious programs such as Trojan horses, keystroke loggers, and certain types of spy ware.
• Content from being lost, or corrupted, because of the actions of computer viruses.
  Restricted content from being hand-copied, or retyped, from a display on a recipient’s screen.
• A recipient from taking a digital photograph of the restricted content displayed on a screen.
• Restricted content from being copied by using third-party screen-capture programs.

The about information was taken from: Information Rights Management in the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Applies to: Microsoft Office Excel 2007, PowerPoint 2007, Word 2007.

By Carl E.Weise