A Digital Rights Management System based on Cloud

In the current Internet, digital entertainment contents, such as video or audio files, are easily accessible due to the new multimedia technologies and to broadband network connections. This causes considerable economic loss to global media players since digital contents, once legitimately obtained, can be illegitimately shared through file sharing services on the Internet. Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems have been proposed to support the protection of copyrighted digital contents. Even though such systems have been widely adopted and promoted by global media players, they are based on proprietary mechanisms that usually work only in closed, monolithic environments. In this regard, systems based on watermarking technologies appear more suited to protect digital copyrighted content. This paper describes the implementation scheme of a DRM system able to ensure the copyright protection of digital content according to an innovative buyer-friendly watermarking protocol. The DRM system has been implemented by exploiting a cloud environment in order to improve the overall performance of the system. In particular, cloud behaves as a service infrastructural provider, since the content provider involved in the watermarking protocol uses cloud to speed up the watermark embedding process and to save storage and bandwidth costs needed to store and to deliver protected contents

ARMS: A new approach to control content sharing and rights distribution

As in other areas, one of the main issues in the educational sector is related with content distribution and sharing. Ensuring that the terms and conditions stated by content owners on the license are respected by the other participants of the value chain, such as distributors (eg. teachers) or consumers (eg. students) is a concern. The assignment of licenses is a need in order to the distributor in the DRM system unambiguously communicate the licensing of the content giving an enhanced user experience. Not only is important to validate the issued license verifying if the terms and the conditions stated in the parental license are respected in the child license but also is important to verify if this license is generated to users that are in a controlled domain. In this paper we will describe our rights-sharing control mechanism based in MPEG-21 standard that augments the control over a domain (the institution educational domain) through the validation of the license to be generated. Through a specific DRM system oriented to the educational context (ARMS - Academic Rights Management System) content owners are allowed to control which users can obtain a license within the constraints imposed by him, giving them the power to control the content usage in the educational domain. To enable this feature some special control mechanism, MPEG-21 based, were implemented in order to control the license issuance. With these verification mechanisms is possible to make the license distributor act like a domain controller regulating the issuance of licenses in the educational context. Our proposal, when applied in the educational domain, greatly increases the expressive power of digital rights management framework without requiring an upgrade to end-user devices.info:eu-repo/semantics/submittedVersio

Content related rights transmission with MPEG-21 in the educational field

One of the main issues affecting educational content distribution and sharing is to ensure that the terms and conditions defined by the content owners are respected by the others, such as distributors and consumers. Authorship and the content integrity are the most basic rights that authors want to preserve in the educational field. To ensure that content and associated rights are protected, cryptographic techniques and mechanisms are applied to content, rights, protection keys and related metadata that are packaged in a digital object. ARMS is a new platform that was developed to preserve author rights in the educational field applying the MPEG-21 standard concepts. A web based services interface is established with the educational Academic Management System of the Academic institution in order to verify the user eligibility in this domain. After obtaining the usage license the user can send the license to other users, if that privilege has been granted. Our proposal uses MPEG-21 concepts in order to enable rights transmission among the main participants in the educational environment but with a mechanism where the inheritance rights established by the author are uphold. Through the integration between ARMS and the Academic Management Information System hosted in the educational institutions, user academic data can be retrieved in order to verify his eligibility.info:eu-repo/semantics/submittedVersio

Digital Copyright Protection: Focus on Some Relevant Solutions

Copyright protection of digital content is considered a relevant problem of the current Internet since content digitalization and high performance interconnection networks have greatly increased the possibilities to reproduce and distribute digital content. Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems try to prevent the inappropriate or illegal use of copyrighted digital content. They are promoted by the major global media players, but they are also perceived as proprietary solutions that give rise to classic problems of privacy and fair use. On the other hand, watermarking protocols have become a possible solution to the problem of copyright protection. They have evolved during the last decade, and interesting proposals have been designed. This paper first presents current trends concerning the most significant solutions to the problem of copyright protection based on DRM systems and then focuses on the most promising approaches in the field of watermarking protocols. In this regard, the examined protocols are discussed in order to individuate which of them can better represent the right trade-off between opposite goals, such as, for example, security and easy of use, so as to prove that it is possible to implement open solutions compatible with the current web context without resorting to proprietary architectures or impairing the protection of copyrighted digital content

The Operation and Regulation of Collective Management Organizations of Music Works in the Digital Era: A Review of Kenya’s Legislative Framework

The era of digitization has brought about new categories of copyright works and new modes of dissemination of these works. This has affected music works copyright, collective management of these rights and the law of copyright as a whole. Scholars hold different opinions on the effect of technological advancement on collective management. One tier believes that it expands the role of CMOs by providing the most appropriate and convenient way to exercise these new bundles of rights. The other tier believes that CMOs might become irrelevant since new technologies enable copyright holders to maintain a direct relationship with users. Consequently, this dissertation seeks to prove that digitization is complementary to the role of CMOs. It is complementary if and when the legislative structure is reformed to contain technology specific provisions. In turn this would justify the continued existence of CMOs. The research will focus on collective management of music works in Kenya. A majority of Kenyans have access to internet making it easier to use and disseminate musical works in the digital environment. This research questions whether this type of usage is subject to collective management and whether the current copyright laws facilitate collective management in the digital environment. The main hypothesis developed is: effective regulation of copyright offers a better attempt at ensuring efficiency of CMOs in the digital era. Kenya’s copyright laws have been amended severally to reflect changes in copyright law. Constant litigation in the area of copyright seeking to interpret the application of current statutory provisions in the digital era, offers a clear indication that the amendments and application of the current copyright laws is not effective given the technological evolution. African countries like South Africa and Nigeria have started their legislative journey in amending their copyright laws. Kenya needs to appreciate the need to amend the current copyright laws and start its own journey of regulating copyright in the digital era

iDRM - Interoperability Mechanisms for Open Rights Management Platforms

Today’s technology is raising important challenges in the Intellectual Property (IP) field in general and to Copyright in particular [Arkenbout et al., 2004]. The same technology that has made possible the access to content in a ubiquitous manner, available to everyone in a simple and fast way, is also the main responsible for the challenges affecting the digital content IP of our days [Chiariglione, 2000]. Technological solutions and legal frameworks were created to meet these new challenges. From the technological point of view, Rights Management Systems (RMS) and Copy Protection Systems (CPS) have been developed and deployed to try to cope with them. At first, they seemed to work however, their closed and non-interoperable nature and a growing number of wrong strategic business decisions, soon lead to a strong opposition. One of the strongest negative points is the lack of rights management interoperability [Geer, 2004]. The work presented on this thesis primarily addresses the RMS interoperability problems. The objective of the thesis is to present some possible mechanisms to improve the interoperability between the different existing and emerging rights management platforms [Guth, 2003a]. Several different possible directions to rights management interoperability are pointed in this thesis. One of the most important is openness. Interoperability between different rights management mechanisms can only be achieved if they are open up to a certain level. Based on this concept, an open rights management platform is designed and presented in this thesis. Also, some of the interoperability mechanisms are presented and explained. This platform makes usage of the emerging service-oriented architectures to provide a set of distributed rights management services. Rights management solutions rely heavily on the establishment of authenticated and trust environments between its different elements. While considering different RMS, the establishment of such trust environments can be somehow complex. This thesis provides a contribution to the establishment of interoperable RMS trust environments through the usage of Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI) mechanisms. Modern rights management systems have to handle with both keying material and licenses which are used mostly to define how content is governed by the system. Managing this is a complex and hard task when different rights management solutions are considered. This thesis presents and describes a generic model to handle the key and license management life cycle, that can be used to establish a global interoperable management solution between different RMS

Data Hiding and Its Applications

Data hiding techniques have been widely used to provide copyright protection, data integrity, covert communication, non-repudiation, and authentication, among other applications. In the context of the increased dissemination and distribution of multimedia content over the internet, data hiding methods, such as digital watermarking and steganography, are becoming increasingly relevant in providing multimedia security. The goal of this book is to focus on the improvement of data hiding algorithms and their different applications (both traditional and emerging), bringing together researchers and practitioners from different research fields, including data hiding, signal processing, cryptography, and information theory, among others

Persistent Protection in Multicast Content Delivery

Computer networks make it easy to distribute digital media at low cost. Digital rights management (DRM) systems are designed to limit the access that paying subscribers (and non-paying intruders) have to these digital media. However, current DRM systems are tied to unicast delivery mechanisms, which do not scale well to very large groups. In addition, the protection provided by DRM systems is in most cases not persistent, i.e., it does not prevent the legitimate subscriber from re-distributing the digital media after reception. We have collected the requirements for digital rights management from various sources, and presented them as a set of eleven requirements, associated with five categories. Several examples of commercial DRM systems are briefly explained and the requirements that they meet are presented in tabular format. None of the example systems meet all the requirements that we have listed. The security threats that are faced by DRM systems are briefly discussed. We have discussed approaches for adapting DRM systems to multicast data transmission. We have explored and evaluated the security protocols of a unicast distribution model, published by Grimen, et al.\, that provides ``persistent protection''. We have found two security attacks and have provided the solution to overcome the discovered attacks. Then we have proposed a more scalable architecture based on the modified model. We call the resulting architecture persistent protection in multicast content delivery. We present and formally validate the protocol for control and data exchange among the interacting parties of our proposal

Application networking for pervasive content delivery

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH