PEER TO PEER DIGITAL RIGHTS MANAGEMENT USING BLOCKCHAIN

Content distribution networks deliver content like videos, apps, and music to users through servers deployed in multiple datacenters to increase availability and delivery speed of content. The motivation of this work is to create a content distribution network that maintains a consumer’s rights and access to works they have purchased indefinitely. If a user purchases content from a traditional content distribution network, they lose access to the content when the service is no longer available. The system uses a peer to peer network for content distribution along with a blockchain for digital rights management. This combination may give users indefinite access to purchased works. The system benefits content rights owners because they can sell their content in a lower cost manner by distributing costs among the community of peers

PrivDRM : a privacy-preserving secure Digital Right Management system

Digital Right Management (DRM) is a technology developed to prevent illegal reproduction and distribution of digital contents. It protects the rights of content owners by allowing only authorised consumers to legitimately access associated digital content. DRM systems typically use a consumer's identity for authentication. In addition, some DRM systems collect consumer's preferences to obtain a content license. Thus, the behaviour of DRM systems disadvantages the digital content consumers (i.e. neglecting consumers' privacy) focusing more on securing the digital content (i.e. biased towards content owners). This paper proposes the Privacy-Preserving Digital Rights Management System (PrivDRM) that allows a consumer to acquire digital content with its license without disclosing complete personal information and without using any third parties. To evaluate the performance of the proposed solution, a prototype of the PrivDRM system has been developed and investigated. The security analysis (attacks and threats) are analysed and showed that PrivDRM supports countermeasures for well-known attacks and achieving the privacy requirements. In addition, a comparison with some well-known proposals shows that PrivDRM outperforms those proposals in terms of processing overhead

A mobile Scenario for Electronic Publishing based on the MIPAMS Architecture

This paper describes several scenarios for the management of digital media, focusing on electronic publishing from mobile environments. The solution proposed in those scenarios is based on MIPAMS (Multimedia Information Protection And Management System), a service-oriented Digital Rights Management (DRM) platform, which enables the creation, registration and distribution of multimedia content in a secure way, respecting intellectual property rights. The particularity of the mobile scenario with respect to others is the limited capability of mobile devices. A specific use case has been identified for the mobile environment and a new system, based on MIPAMS, has been designed for the electronic publishing environment.Postprint (published version

A web-based rights management system for developing trusted value

We present an innovative architecture that enables the digital representation of original works and derivatives while implementing Digital Rights Management (DRM) features. The architecture’s main focus is on promoting trust within the multimedia content value networks rather than solely on content access and protection control. The system combines different features common in DRM systems such as licensing, content protection, authorization and reporting together with innovative concepts, such as the linkage of original and derived content and the definition of potential rights. The transmission of reporting requests across the content value network combined with the possibility for authors to preserve rights over derivative works enables the system to distribute income amongst all the actors involved in different steps of the creation and distribution chain. The implementation consists of a web application which interacts with different external services plus a desktop user application used to render protected content. It is currently publicly accessible for evaluation.Postprint (published version

DYNAMAC media distribution system

This thesis describes the initial development of a multiplatform client-server based system capable of distributing content derived from a new format over an IP network. The system will also provide digital rights management and secure transmission of video content utilizing the DYNAMAC video compression/decompression algorithm. The work presented here is part of the Digital Media Research Group, which is focused on the use of the DYNAMAC algorithm for digital rights management and distribution of high definition media content in real time, while achieving better efficiency on bandwidth usages. Three components were created with this initial development: a player capable of rendering video content compressed with the DYNAMAC algorithm, a server that distributes the compress video content over an IP network, and a protocol specially design to communicate and transfer the video content from the server to the client. Since the development was based on the Java Media Framework, the client and the server of the distribution system will be able to be installed and run on any computer platform with a Java Runtime Environment. The fact that the system is written in Java also means that any changes can be made to single components without having to change the entire system. In this paper I intent to describe the approach taken to develop the system and the results obtain, were several videos are transmitted demonstrating the functionalities of the DYNAMAC algorithm and the DYNAMAC media distribution system

Using OMA DRM 2.0 protected content: Ogg vorbis protected audio under symbian OS

The lack of control inherent to digital content has been put on the spotlight by copyright infringement coupled with massive content distribution online (e.g., Peer-to-Peer). Digital Rights Management seems to be the solution to counter this problem advocating the use of cryptography and other related security mechanisms to protect digital content and to associate rights with it which determine how, when and by whom it can be consumed. The Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) specifies mobile service enablers in order to ensure interoperability throughout the mobile spectrum. As prominent mobile devices, Symbian OS smartphones offer an interesting platform for the demonstration of OMA DRM for the consumption of multimedia content. This article outlines the mechanisms enabling the protected consumption of the open and patent-free audio format (Ogg Vorbis Website), Ogg Vorbis using an OMA DRM 2.0 compliant audio player application running under Symbian OS (directed for mobile devices).info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

DRM: A Publisher-Imposed Impediment to Progress, or a Legitimate Defense of Publisher/Author Intellectual Property Rights

Digital distribution of content provides clear advantages to all stakeholders in scholarly communications, but it also introduces new complexities and challenges. The exercise of control is a significant one. Is media — whether for scholarly or for entertainment purposes— going to be more open, instead of closed? Does stringent digital rights management (DRM) help or hinder the development and use of content? Do devices which enable broader and more immediate access to content affect pricing and control? How do librarians and publishers protect their interests, and ensure that content can be purchased, owned, and used most effectively? Representatives from book, journal, and multimedia publishers talk about how they’ve determined what (if any) DRM is appropriate for their content, and a librarian discusses the impact DRM (or lack thereof) has on scholarship

The fair dealing doctrine in respect of digital books

Copyright is essentially the right of the rightsholder of an original work to prohibit others from making or distributing unauthorised copies of his or her work. More specifically for this dissertation, when an end user deals with digital content, one of the aims of copyright becomes the balancing of the conflicting interests in ‘exclusivity’ on the one hand, and in ‘access to information’ on the other. Exclusivity is achieved by the rightsholders through technological protection measures to protect their commercial interests. Access to information is achieved where works are available to the general public without payment and technological protection measures and where the digital content is not directly marketed for commercial gain. Exclusivity and access to information are two conflicting cultures surrounding copyright in the digital era. It is submitted that unless we find a socio-economic-legal way for the dynamic coexistence of these two conflicting cultures by means of fair dealing, the culture of exclusivity will eventually dominate fair access to information. The transient nature of digital content means that rightsholders have little or no control over their works once the end user has obtained a legal digital copy of the work. The right ‘to prohibit’ end users from copying and distributing unauthorised copies is, therefore, largely meaningless unless a legal or other solution can be found to discourage end users from the unauthorised reproduction and distribution of unauthorised copies of the work. Currently, technological protection measures are used to manage such digital rights because legal permissions within the doctrine of fair dealing for works in printed (analogue) format are inadequate. It is, however, submitted that a legal solution to discourage end users from copying and distributing unauthorised copies rests on two pillars. Firstly, the solution must be embedded in state-of-the-art digital rights management systems and secondly the business model used by publishers, and academic publishers in particular, should change fundamentally from a business-to-consumer model to a business-to-business model. Empirical evidence shows that the printing of e-content will continue to be relevant far into the future. Therefore, the management of fair dealing to allow for the printing of digital content will become increasingly important at educational institutions that use e-books as prescribed course material. It is submitted that although the origination cost of print editions and e-books correspond, the relatively high retail price of e-books appears to be based on the fact that academic publishers of digital content do not have the legal or digital rights management tools to manage the challenges arising from the fair dealing doctrine. The observation that academic publishers are reluctant to grant collecting societies mandates to manage the distribution of digital content, and/or the right to manage the authorised reproduction (printing) of the digital content, supports this hypothesis. Ultimately, with technologies at our disposal, the fair use of content in digital and print format can be achieved because it should simply be cheaper to comply with copyright laws than to make unauthorised digital or printed copies of content that our society desperately needs to make South Africa a winning nation.Mercantile LawLL. M

EDU-DRM: A Digital Rights Management (DRM) system for K-12 education

The technological achievements in digital publishing have made paperless education possible even in K-12 education. Aside from high bandwidth distribution infrastructure, the main difficulties of digital publishing are preserving personal information and protecting the rights of copyrighted contents. Although specially designed Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems can be used to control distribution and usage of private and/or copyrighted contents in K-12 education, dealing with a large number of bursty concurrent access requests and changing the access rights of a large number of students from one content class to another at the end of each education period make the problem different from existing ones. This paper introduces a new DRM system, called EDU-DRM, which includes a novel bit based authorization approach to reduce the processing time for authorization requests and automatize the access right adjustments with predefined rules for K-12 education. During the study, an experimental framework is designed using Apache Bench to analyze the proposed approach and evaluate it. The system is compared with XML based authorization approach and the results are presented in the paper. (C) 2019 Sharif University of Technology. All rights reserved