It's tough to make a profit selling digital content without protection from piracy. The current system of digital safeguards is very much a work in progress. Experts on DRM in New York on Wednesday to discuss the field's latest trends and techniques at the DRM Strategies Conference & Expo.

Highlights of the show will include contrasting demonstrations of digital rights management technologies by leading vendors including Microsoft Corp., Authentica, ContentGuard, MacroVision Corp. and others.

At the moment, there are plenty of DRM solutions to choose from; in fact the plethora of competing DRM approaches creates something of a standards quagmire that slows overall adoption of the technology. It's not clear whether the demos offered at the show will provide more clarity, but they'll definitely provide more information.

The mobile and wireless market is awaiting a break in the legal logjam over DRM. Click here to read more.

Also, much of the current confusion over DRM results from unresolved issues of intellectual property law, with regard to both DRM technology itself, as well as to the content that DRM protects.

The Supreme Court's recent Grokster ruling held that peer-to-peer file sharing services have "vicarious liability" for copyright infringements of which they are aware but fail to stop. The decision undoubtedly will have widespread impact on consumers and content owners alike; however, the devil is likely to be in the details.

In Grokster, the justices reversed a lower court ruling and remanded the case back to the lower court to determine a specific judgment, so the actual impact of the case will remain unknown for several months at least.

A panel of legal experts at the DRM Conference will share their views on where the Grokster case will lead. Speakers on the panel will include Dave E. Green, counsel for NBC; Edward Hernstadt, a partner at Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz, a well-known law firm specializing in intellectual property law; and Fred von Lohmann, senior attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The consumer market isn't the only field of interest for DRM players. The need to protect digital assets is critical in many enterprise settings as well. The second day of the conference splits into two tracks, an enterprise track and a media track.

In the Enterprise track, which will focus on the need to protect critical information in large organizations, three different panels will take on distinct aspects of ERM (enterprise rights management.)

One will focus on the IT architecture of ERM and how that relates to other enterprise-level IT security measures. Another panel will share case studies in ERM, tracing the path from identifying the business problem at issue through the results of launching a solution.

A third panel will focus even more narrowly on ERM solutions in the financial services industry, which must deal with the regulatory requirements of federal, state and local governments, while also facilitating business transactions through the use of technologies such as "Virtual Deal Rooms" in the investment banking community. The panel will talk about which technologies are working best and who is making them work.

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