Security, trust and risk in Digital Rights Management ecosystem

In the last decades, Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology has been laid emphasis on digital contents protection and related security policies, mechanisms and implementation. In order to effectively protect digital assets with copyrights against piracy and misuse, it is necessary for the contents value chain as a whole to investigate on some open issues and advances. The paper proposed three fundamental aspects regarding security, trust and risk, as underlies DRM Ecosystem. And then, digital rights negotiation and multi-level contents verification, multi-participant trust framework, as well as the risk management, were addressed so as to uphold two generic DRM application scenarios, with an ultimate goal to meet key requirements of security, interoperability and usability.

1. INTRODUCTION

In order to positively protect Intellectual Property and to realize the legitimate and controlled usage on digital contents (assets), DRM has become a focus for the society as a whole, where the contents industry, academic realms, governments and even some civil liberty are involved in. Generally, DRM is an umbrella term involved both in business realizations of the contents industry and in valuable explorations on multiple scientific disciplines, for instance, information technology, economics and law [1]. Besides, recently Mobile DRM technology, which is oriented by a mobile network application scenario, has been paying more attention to the effective protection of digital contents in the whole life cycle for the mobile network environment. In North America and European Union, DRM-protected mobile contents service is listed among the four kinds of DRM killer applications.