Digital Rights Management in Office 2003

CNet News reports that the upcoming revision to Microsoft's Office Suite -- Office 2003 -- will incorporate Digital Rights Management into office documents, allowing users to restrict what capabilities are possible (such as printing and copying) with a particular document.

These features are desired by some for tighter document security, and represents an optional level of security -- however, one side effect would be incompatibility of secure documents with older versions of Office as well as 3rd party software (OpenOffice).

While the Mac version of Office would presumably be brought up to par by Microsoft, this could potentially limit 3rd party options, including long rumored efforts of an Apple-branded Office Suite... or even future versions of Appleworks.