Depending on network conditions, a communication network could be overloaded when media are transmitted. Research has been carried out to lessen network overloading, such as by filtering, load distribution, frame dropping, and other methods. Among these methods, one of the most effective is frame dropping, which reduces specified video frames for bandwidth diminution. In frame dropping, B-frames are dropped and then I- and P-frames are dropped, based on the dependency among the frames. This paper proposes a scheme for protecting copyrights by encryption, when frame dropping is applied to reduce the bandwidth of media based on the MPEG-4 file format. We designed two kinds of frame dropping: the first stores and then sends the dropped files and the other drops frames in real time when transmitting. We designed three kinds of encryption methods using the DES algorithm to encrypt MPEG-4 data: macro block encryption in I-VOP, macro block and motion vector encryption in P-VOP, and macro block and motion vector encryption in I-, P-VOP. Based on these three methods, we implemented a digital rights management solution for MPEG-4 data streaming. We compared the results of dropping, encryption, decryption, and the quality of the video sequences to select an optimal method, and found that there was no noticeable difference between the video sequences recovered after frame dropping and the ones recovered without frame dropping. The best performance in the encryption and decryption of frames was obtained when we applied the macro block and motion vector encryption in I-, P-VOP.