Bethesda, Md. and New York, April 4, 2001 - Accenture and ContentGuard, Inc., today announced an agreement to work together to provide digital rights management (DRM) solutions to enable clients to manage rights in digital content such as eBooks, music and video. Accenture is a leading global management and technology consultancy and ContentGuard is a leading provider of open, flexible DRM solutions. Accenture and ContentGuard are collaborating to meet clients' digital content distribution needs by offering customized packages of ContentGuard's RightsEdge' technology and services. This will offer clients the opportunity to implement solutions in-house, outsource the entire digital content distribution process or select a combination of the two. "The digitization of content and the expansion of networking presents companies with a wide variety of business enhancement opportunities," says Michael Miron, ContentGuard CEO. "Our alliance combines ContentGuard's DRM technology and experience with Accenture's ability to provide global companies ways of exploring the digital arena and strategically and confidently moving valuable content onto the Web and other channels in ways that makes sense for their business." The market for digital music, consumer eBooks and digital TV is expected to reach upwards of $30.1B by 2005, according to Accenture's "The New Digital Content Consumer: Large and In Charge" study that was published in December, 2000. "Digital rights management is an increasingly important application within the rapidly evolving digital content landscape. As more and more content becomes digital, content owners face the mounting challenges of controlling and protecting it. They will need to put a whole new set of mechanisms in place to address this while making it easy for the end consumer," said Debbie Polishook, Accenture -partner, Media & Entertainment industry group. "By teaming with ContentGuard, we will be able to provide a leading-edge DRM solution that makes it possible for content owners to sell and distribute digital works - making it easier for the consumer to legitimately consume digital content."