DRM Technology for Mobile Multimedia

Mobile multimedia has been promoted as a promising service and application in mobile e-commerce (m-commerce) by many mobile operators and mobile service providers, when high-speed mobile networks are expected to take off in the near future. However, at present, mobile multimedia is still in its infancy, accessed by relatively lowend mobile devices with limited bandwidth and resources. A typical example is Orange in Hong Kong which launched a low-grade multimedia service in 2000 to test the market with current mobile technologies. Due to the physical constraints of a 2.5G mobile network, audio broadcast is the best service that the network can offer up to date. However, in the near future, when advanced mobile networks and technologies become available, higher demands will be placed on the quality of mobile multimedia services. Such services support both audio and video data, for example, video conferencing, music video, video-on-demand and so on. Rights management deserves more serious concern because intellectual property of distributed multimedia content is as valuable as a company’s physical assets (Doherty, 2002). This will become even more important when mobile multimedia services become marketable and an essential part of the business. The purpose of a digital rights management (DRM) system is to allow owners of digital assets (movies, songs) to distribute their products/services/contents electronically in a controlled way (Peinado, 2002). DRM technology makes various online payment schemes possible, such as pay-per-view, pay-perdownload, pay-per-game and so on. Hence, mobile service providers are able to control end users’ use of, and accessibility to, their products, and stand to gain huge profits from this capability with the DRM technology (Foroughi, Albin, & Gillard, 2002). A successful DRM system should address both business and technical issues (Grab, 2002), but this chapter only addresses and presents issues in the technical side due to the nature of this book. We present some critical issues of mobile DRM for mobile multimedia. A proposal of mobile DRM framework is presented to meet mobile technology. This chapter is concluded by presenting future directions of mobile DRM for mobile multimedia.

Over the last few years, Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems have become increasingly successful in various areas of digital content production and distribution. While DRM-related technology research has achieved a certain degree of maturity since the 1990�s, the legal framework surrounding DRM systems remains in flux and is fiercely debated. This keynote speech first provides an overview of the various ways by which digital content is protected in a DRM system. The intertwining protection by technology, contracts, technology licenses and anti-circumvention regulations may lead to a new property right making copyright protection obsolete. However, there is a danger of over-protection: questions of fair use and other limitations to traditional copyright law have to be addressed. If competition is not able to solve this tension between the interests of content providers and the interests of users or the society at large -- which seems doubtful at least -- it is the law that has to provide a solution. The speech presents the different approaches legislatures in Europe and in the United States have adopted. Second, the speech discusses recent developments at the intersection of DRM and the law, in particular the discussions about DRM interoperability, patents on DRM technology, DRM standards, and the relationship between DRM and levy systems as well as between DRM and trusted computing. Third, the speech analyzes recent scholarship that attempts to solve legal and policy questions surrounding DRM on a technological level. The speech questions whether the tension between technological protection and public values such as fair use, privacy, competition and an innovation commons is really irreconcilable. It argues for a more nuanced approach that explores possibilities and limitations of a value-centered technology design of DRM systems. Only if technology research focuses on such questions, the disapproval of DRM systems by many legal scholars and policy activists could possibly diminish in the long term.

2 - Digital Rights Management Systems

This article presents a roadmap of emerging legal problems in the area of Digital Rights Management (DRM). It argues against adopting fundamentalist viewpoints in the DRM policy debate. In particular, DRM technology is much more flexible than many DRM critics acknowledge. The article covers various problems that are less frequently discussed in legal and policy circles. It analyzes the relationship between DRM, fair use, and innovation, using rights locker architectures, dynamic DRM systems, the Creative Commons project, DRM technology license agreements, and security research as examples. It addresses the alleged dichotomy between DRM and copyright levy systems as well as the implications of DRM for privacy protection. By analyzing various technology platforms, it describes the implications DRM has for competition in platform markets as well as in complementary aftermarkets. Finally, the article assesses recent efforts to standardize DRM technology, both by the private sector (in particular TCPA and Palladium), and by the legislature.

클라우드 컴퓨팅 기술과 스마트 장치 기술의 발전은 다양한 분야에서 그 영향력을 확대하고 있다. 콘텐츠 서비스에 있어서 콘텐츠를 안전하게 보호하기 위한 DRM(digital rights management) 기술은 매우 중요한 요소로 다양한 스마트 장치에서 시간 및 장소의 제약 없이 서비스를 제공하기 위해서는 DRM 기술 간의 상호 운용성(interoperability)을 해결해야 한다. 본 논문에서는 클라우드 환경에서 DRM 기능들을 서비스로 제공하는 DRM 클라우드를 연구하여 서로 다른 DRM 기술들을 서비스로 제공함으로써 상호 운용성을 해결하고자 한다. 즉, 서로 다른 DRM이 적용된 콘텐츠를 스마트 장치에서 사용하고자 할 때 DRM 클라우드로부터 해당 DRM 모듈과 기능들을 SaaS와 같은 서비스로 콘텐츠의 사용을 제어한다. 이를 위해 DRM 클라우드 사용자와 DRM 클라우드 간의 원활한 서비스 호출과 제공을 수행하는 중개자인 DRM Proxy의 기능과 구조를 정의하고 구현 결과를 기술한다. The development of cloud computing technology and smart devices have increasingly been expanding the influence in various fields. Although DRM(Digital Rights Management) is a very important technology for secure content services, interoperability among DRM technologies must be addressed in order to provide the service without the constraints of time and place on various smart devices. In this paper, we study DRM Cloud which provides DRM functions as a service in cloud computing environment, and address interoperability problem by providing different DRM technologies as a cloud service. That is, when a user wants to play contents with the different DRM technologies on a smart device, the usage of the content is controlled by providing the corresponding DRM module and function as SaaS from DRM cloud. To do this, we define the functions and structure of DRM Proxy which performs smooth service call and provision between DRM cloud user and DRM cloud, and finally we describe the experimental implementation result.

Rights expression languages (RELs) form a central component of digital rights management (DRM) systems. The process of development of RELs transforms the rights requirements to a formal language ready to be used in DRM systems. Decisions regarding the design of the conceptual model, syntax, semantics, and other such properties of the language, affect not only each other, but also the integration of the language in DRM systems, and the design of DRM system as a whole. This chapter provides a detailed analysis of each step of this process and the tradeoffs involved that not only affect the properties of the REL, but also the DRM system using that REL.

This paper presents a digital rights management (DRM) system for digital broadcasting based on home servers (DBHS) using receivers with large-capacity storage devices. DBHS will enable viewers to enjoy 'television anytime/anywhere' by utilizing these storage functions. Our proposed DRM system is suitable for broadcasting, and allows both rights protection and advanced access to content held on home storage devices (in terms of validity, usage and charge conditions, and so on). We developed a prototype DRM system using a Pentium3 personal computer (1 GHz) in order to evaluate the nonlinear playback and 'trick-play' modes of encrypted content on the hard disk drive (HDD). Using this prototype, we confirmed that the nonlinear playback of content encrypted using the proposed DRM system could be processed in real time. The functionality in terms of trick-play modes was equal to that of commercially available hard disk recorders. In addition, we developed a security module for the DRM system in the form of a smart card with a built-in processor. We confirmed that the proposed DRM system utilizing the new smart card could be applied to DBHS.

Digital rights management (DRM) is an efficient method to protect digital content in various applications such as digital TV, IPTV, video on demand, etc. In China, the legal and administration systems, business models and industrial chain are different from those of other countries and therefore have special requirements on DRM technologies. In this paper, we propose a new licensing design to extend the classic DRM architecture where the new system takes into account the commercial integrity, central monitoring, and potential user scalability. We propose a licensing method of secure audit report and mass-license, with architecture of linked license portals and license issuers as basic insurance. The extension does not impact on the security of former DRM systems, and is compatible with the PKI-based trust model.

The desires for robust digital rights management (DRM) systems are not new to the commercial world. Indeed, industrial research, development and deployment of systems with DRM aspects (most notably crude copy-control schemes) have a long history. Yet to date the industry has not seen much commercial success from shipping these systems on top of platforms that support general-purpose computing. There are many factors contributing to this lack of acceptance of current DRM systems, but I see three specific areas of work that are key adoption blockers today and ripe for further academic and commercial research. The lack of a general-purpose rights expression/authorization language, robust trust management engines and attestable trusted computing bases (TCBs) all hamper industrial development and deployment of DRM systems for digital content. In this paper I briefly describe each of these challenges, provide examples of how the industry is approaching each problem, and discuss how the solutions to each one of them are dependent on the others.

An improved E-DRM scheme for mobile environments

Owing to the proliferation of digitized media applications, such as e-Book, streaming videos, web images, shared music, etc., there is a growing need to protect the intellectual property rights of digital media and prevent illegal copying and falsification. This explains the strong demand for digital rights management (DRM), which is an access control technology that protects and enforces the rights associated with the use of digital content, such as multimedia data. The most important functions of DRM are to prevent unauthorized access and the creation of unauthorized copies of digital content, and moreover to provide a mechanism by which copies can be detected and traced (content tracking). Digital rights management is the most critical component of the intellectual property management and protection (IPMP) protocol widely promoted in the MPEG standards. Under the IPMP's scope, intellectual property (IP) is anything whose use owes the inventors or the owners some form of compensation. This could be a particular media application or it could be the technology used by the media. The management of IP involves storage and serving, appropriate authorization of use, and correct billing and tracking. The protection of IP prevents unauthorized use or misuse of the IP and can make legitimate use easy. According to [1], an effective DRM system should have the following four requirements. (1) The DRM system must package the content to be protected in a secure manner. (2) The DRM system must obtain the access conditions (license) specified by the owner of the protected content. (3) The DRM system must determine whether the access conditions have been fulfilled […]

Geospatial digital rights management

This paper presents mechanisms to manage and protect notification of events in Digital Rights Management systems. Event notification is an important part within DRM systems that enable the controlled use of multimedia content through the complete digital valued chain, from creation to consumption of digital assets. These modules are responsible for reporting events related to multimedia content and/or peers that interact with them. Then, producers and distributors of multimedia content can be informed of the usage of the multimedia content that they have produced or distributed. In some cases, it is also important to protect the reported data in order to ensure its integrity and authenticity. I. INTRODUCTION Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems enable the creation, distribution and consumption of multimedia content. These systems are made up of different elements that enable the controlled use of multimedia content through the complete digital value chain. Typical components of DRM systems are digital object creators, license creators and interpreters, protection servers, etc. Moreover, something that could help when using multimedia content in a controlled way is the notification of events being done by users of multimedia systems. In this way, distributors of multimedia content can be informed of the usage of the multimedia objects they have provided through a web site, a downloading service or whatever distribution mechanism used. Afterwards, users illegally distributing content could be prosecuted by means of these activity records. By means of the chain of licenses or digital objects defining the contractual relationships between the actors of the value chain, they could be informed of the use of the content that they have created, adapted, distributed, etc. The notification of events could be useful, for example example to monitor the usage of copyrighted material or to know the exact connectivity conditions between two Peers when trying to deliver multimedia content. In the first case, a distributor could specify that, whenever the content that he distributes is rendered, he would receive a notification enabling him to manage his royalties. Then, the Peer would generate a notification, upon the content is rendered, which would be delivered to the distributor. This event notification would contain information about the digital content and the conditions under which it has been rendered. MPEG-21 Event Reporting (1) provides a standardised way for sharing information about events amongst peers and users. Such events are related to multimedia content and/or peers that interact with them. In the MPEG-21 context, the reporting messages that include information about different aspects of media usage are called Event Reports. MPEG-21 Event Reporting had some limitations when trying to manage events in trusted systems. Then, we proposed a way to improve this standard expanding its capabilities. A core experiment was carried out in order to verify the solution we had proposed for the report of events in trusted systems. This paper presents the solution that we proposed and how it was integrated in the MPEG-21 Event Reporting standard. On the other hand, in some of the above situations, especially in non-trusted systems, event notifications should be protected. We should guarantee access and modification only to the users that have permission. MPEG-21 Event Reporting standard initiative does not take into account the security of the events being notified. This specification does not provide a way to ensure integrity and authenticity or protection to the reported data neither to the request data. Usually, it is important to protect the sensible data reported, as the user data and the operations that he/she has performed will be later used to produce usage statistics, billing information, etc. This paper also presents a possible solution to this issue.

This chapter gives a concise introduction to digital rights management (DRM) systems by first presenting the basic ingredients of the architecture of DRM systems for (audio and/or video) content delivery, followed by an introduction to two open-standard DRM systems, one developed in the mobile world (Open Mobile Alliance DRM) and another one in the world of consumer electronics (Marlin).

The use of Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems involves several stakeholders, such as the content provider, the license provider, and the user, each having their own incentives to use the system. Proper use of the system implies that these incentives can only be met if certain security requirements are fulfilled. Much attention in literature has been devoted to specific security aspects of DRM systems. The contributions of this chapter consist of deriving a systematic overview of core security requirements for DRM systems. This chapter conducts a stakeholder analysis, gives an objective tree for each relevant stakeholder, and develops a simple, generic conceptual model to arrive at the set of core security requirements.