There are occasions when information that has been protected by Information Rights Management is no longer required, this could mean information can be put out into the public domain to encourage further innovation, to address past issues, adopt lessons learnt or to abide by some regulatory or legislation requirement about making information accessible to everyone.

This key factor should be considered when information or data owners should consider when choosing an Information Rights Management solution. I have seen many occasions where there has been a very high emphasis on protecting data with information rights management, but no question has been asked how to remove the protection so that it becomes accessible to all.

For example in the United States the Freedom of Information Act that was signed into law in 1966 allows for the full or partial disclosure of previously unreleased information and documents controlled by the United States Government. In the United Kingdom the Freedom of Information Act 2000 is an Act of the Parliament that introduces a public “right to know” in relation to public bodies in which members of the public can demand for information not in the public domain.  The full provisions of the act came into force on 1 January 2005. In the private sector there have been occasions where businesses have released trade secrets into public domain to encourage further innovation.

Transparency means that for full disclosure protection has to be completely removed from all documents previously protected with information rights management, but partial disclosure means that information protection has to be organised in a logical order to take into account the need to release part of that information into the public domain without compromising information that still needs to be protected.

A lack of strategy to address putting information previously addressed as confidential into the public domain could prove to be more of a headache than implementing Information Rights Management if not adequately addressed during the planning stage. Whatever information rights management solution you decide to go with you need to be assured that you can easily remove the rights protection on any data as easily as you can put it on.