Digital multimedia at home and content rights management

To protect artists' and content providers' rights, it is desirable to have an optimized intellectual property management (IPM) system that allows content owners to specify access conditions. In other words, having created a content or having searched, selected and located an item of content in a networked system, content rights management (CRM) will ensure and protect content rights and revenues once the content is acquired by home appliances. Rights owners want to be confident that digitally bit-perfect content captured onto local storage is not subject to abuse and consequent loss of revenues. Yet, this kind of service can only be widely accepted if it doesn't restrict or prohibit fair uses. This paper intends to address this problem, summarize the state-of-art technologies, and raise some questions for further work directions.