For what it's worth, the Oxford English Dictionary gives two citations for the phrase, one from January 1996 and one from May 2005. It's not obvious to me from the quoted text whether the 1996 citation actually has quite the same meaning as we're talking about here.

It's from something in PR Newswire, and it says: "As an industry consultant Bob has been a leader in developing business strategies and cooperative relationships in the area of digital rights management and content distribution."

And what's not clear to me is whether that's "digital (rights management)" -- i.e., using computer technology to enforce copyright etc., the usual present-day use of the term -- or "(digital rights) management" -- i.e., everything to do with handling copyright etc. in the specific context of digital data.

Neither DRM or Digital Rights Management are mentioned in the actual DMCA legislation. This terminology emerged later IIRC.

https://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf

Doesn't make it any less annoying, from my own perception anyway. I have known about DRM standing for Direct Rendering Manager for years, but it's really annoying even today.

Sure, but it'll take a little longer to recognize the context, because the acronym is overloaded. It's like IPC. Or how "inflammable" means both "not flammable" and "extremely flammable".

Let's take a survey and ask people what "DRM" stands for.

I would bet a decent amount of money that the copyguarding one wins out over the rendering-manager one.

not at all, I recall that no one (outside of the music industry perhaps) used the phrase 'digital rights management' until iTunes added DRM to music in 2003/2004, other things like the copy protection for videotapes/DVDs/games were just generically called copyprotection, or other domain specific terms such as activation (in the case of things like windows XP), not DRM.