With RapidRights, a publisher can sell a certain number of digital reprints without having to know the identities of the recipients -- which is not possible using either Adobe's standard Content Server packaging technology or that of Aries Systems' DocuRights, the other leading DRM vendor to the medical journal field. 

RapidRights is a relatively simple DRM technology for PDFs; it encrypts the PDF and packages it with a small client application that only adds about 50KB to the file size.  The typical customer is a pharmaceutics firm wanting reprints of a journal article about the efficacy of a certain drug it manufactures, which it can distribute to doctors in hopes of getting them to prescribe the drug to patients.  The drug maker purchases a number of reprints. RapidRights sets a counter on the server corresponding to the number of reprints purchased and sends the drug maker a packaged PDF, which contains a URL specific to that customer.  The drug company then emails the packaged PDF to doctors.

When a doctor tries to open the file for the first time, the client application goes out to that URL and checks if the counter is greater than zero.  If so, it decrements the counter, deposits a key on the doctor's computer, and unlocks the PDF.  The doctor can forward the PDF to colleagues, who may repeat the process.  If the counter falls to zero, then the doctor gets instructions on how to purchase a reprint for herself. 

Cadmus, which provides a wide variety of services to the periodical publishing industry, introduced this technology last summer; by that time it had already been use at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, which used it to distribute case studies in the same manner as Harvard Business School uses SealedMedia's DRM to distribute its cases.  The added benefit of the Cadmus service is that it can also fulfill hardcopy reprint requests via print-on-demand.

The RapidRights service will undoubtedly be a boon to Elsevier, which has been recently reeling from the impact of a growing number of leading universities refusing to renew its journal subscriptions in protest over high subscription prices as well as Elsevier's practice of requiring universities to subscribe to less-important journals as a condition of subscribing to "must-have" journals.  RapidRights enables Elsevier to increase revenue from corporate customers while dramatically reducing distribution costs.  Given that no one sees any growth in the university library market -- which is the core market for STM journal publishers -- RapidRights could be a key survival tactic for that entire industry.