Joint Watermarking Scheme for Multiparty Multilevel DRM Architecture

Multiparty multilevel digital rights management (DRM) architecture involving several levels of distributors in between an owner and a consumer has been suggested as an alternative business model to the traditional two-party (buyer-seller) DRM architecture for digital content delivery. In the two-party DRM architecture, cryptographic techniques are used for secure delivery of the content, and watermarking techniques are used for protecting the rights of the seller and the buyer. The cryptographic protocols used in the two-party case for secure content delivery can be directly applied to the multiparty multilevel case. However, the watermarking protocols used in the two-party case may not directly carry over to the multiparty multilevel case, as it needs to address the simultaneous security concerns of multiple parties such as the owner, multiple levels of distributors, and consumers. Towards this, in this paper, we propose a joint digital watermarking scheme using Chinese remainder theorem for the multiparty multilevel DRM architecture. In the proposed scheme, watermark information is jointly created by all the parties involved; then a watermark signal is generated out of it and embedded into the content. This scheme takes care of the security concerns of all parties involved. Further, in the event of finding an illegal copy of the content, the violator(s) can be traced back.