Digital rights protection - a great challenge of the new millennium

The digital era is a blessing and a curse at the same time. The huge benefits of digital contents leading to the explosion of multimedia industries are also responsible for the huge piracy. The weapons against this piracy are technology and legislation, defining digital rights management (DRM), able to protect and enforce the rights associated to the digital content. The paper discusses the necessity of intellectual rights protection generally and the concepts of DRM in today's life. It also presents the state of art concerning encryption and watermarking, the main technical solutions for DRM, and discusses the challenges and new directions for this topic.