Jeffrey Hunker, dean of the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University, spoke recently to CIO Insight Copy Chief Debra D'Agostino about the future of digital content control technologies.

Resource Library:

How significant will digital antipiracy controls be in the future?

I think DRM definitely is going to be a big part of our lives, and there are probably two reasons for that. DRM has to do, essentially, with how we define and how we protect the information that we want to share on a limited basis over a network, so it has enormous practical issues for that reason. It's not just the recording industry that cares about it.

Really, the question of rights management affects anyone who wants to share information but who also wants to be able to control the distribution of that information. I think that covers a lot of what any business, and a lot of individuals, frankly, would like to do.

The second reason why I think it's going to be very, very significant is because DRM in a lot of ways is very closely related to the protection of privacy and security. If you can control who has access to sets of information, it will obviously have important implications in terms of one's security. And if you flip it around, controlling access to information also is a way of defining the limits of your privacy. And so I see for both of those reasons this being a very, very important and very central issue.