Will More DRM Mean Fewer Audits?

With the prospect of new DRM and nastier audit procedures, 2007 is shaping up to be the year of software license enforcement by the major software publishers. And since we're inevitably going to be hearing a lot more gripes in those areas in the coming months, now is perhaps a good time to air the opinion of one IT manager who thinks there may be a silver lining for customers in these tougher anti-piracy measure

With the prospect of new DRM and nastier audit procedures, 2007 is shaping up to be the year of software license enforcement by the major software publishers. And since we're inevitably going to be hearing a lot more gripes in those areas in the coming months, now is perhaps a good time to air the opinion of one IT manager who thinks there may be a silver lining for customers in these tougher anti-piracy measures.

The reader first responded to a recent story in which we discussed Microsoft and Adobe corporate copy protection schemes by expressing some sympathy at least for what Adobe is doing with its Adobe License Manager (ALM) DRM. "While I cannot comment on Micro$oft's software management system, I can comment on Adobe's," the reader wrote. "It is nowhere near as bad as everyone makes it out to be. You purchase licenses from Adobe, in this case for Acrobat. Your ALM makes a one-time, connection to Adobe's central licensing server to install your purchased licenses on your server. After that, no subsequent connections to Adobe's systems are necessary, except when you purchase additional product seats. Rather than the activation routine phoning to Adobe's licensing system, it phones to yours, behind your firewalls. You can then distribute as many copies as needed, just the first ones to activate will be unlocked."

The reader's company has several thousand seats of Acrobat and he helped beta test ALM. "I agree that the system has some shortcomings -- failed equipment means you have to phone Adobe to recover a license, no means to yank or pull back a license, no failover/redundancy, no support for multiple sites (global offices) and the like," he wrote. But he thinks the ALM technology should actually help "the corporate customer in that it reduces Adobe's desire to audit you. Think about it, if they audit you and find that you are using the system properly and are out of compliance that means that they didn't do a good job of designing the system. Since they don't want something like that getting out they actually have a desire to not audit you ... Hey, if it helps keep the lawyers at bay, I'll take a cold hard look to see how it can benefit my business."