Digital rights management for visual content in mobile applications

With the emergence of wide bandwidth wireless networks, mobile Internet is set to provide a significant channel of multimedia content distribution. In the absence of proper digital rights management (DRM) systems, there is a real risk for content owners and producers to lose important revenues due to their intellectual property rights. To avoid market fragmentation and ensure interoperability, the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) has set to define open DRM specification in their standardization process. In this paper, we review the specified methods of DRM within OMA. We present a scheme that utilizes watermarking as complementary solution for DRM on mobile devices, and we discuss how it could enhance the security of copyrighted media distribution. We focus the attention on the application of DRM methods for visual content in mobile devices.