EDU-DRM: A digital rights management (DRM) system for K-12 education

Abstract

The technological achievements in digital publishing have made paperless education possible even in K-12 education. Aside from high bandwidth distribution infrastructure, the main dificulties of digital publishing are preserving personal information and protecting the rights of copyrighted contents. Although specially designed Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems can be used to control distribution and usage of private and/or copyrighted contents in K-12 education, dealing with a large number of bursty concurrent access requests and changing the access rights of a large number of students from one content class to another at the end of each education period make the problem difierent from existing ones. This paper introduces a new DRM system, called EDU-DRM, which includes a novel bit based authorization approach to reduce the processing time for authorization requests and automatize the access right adjustments with predefined rules for K-12 education. During the study, an experimental framework is designed using Apache Bench to analyze the proposed approach and evaluate it. The system is compared with XML based authorization approach and the results are presented in the paper.