Open standards-a cure for digital rights management?

Abstract

Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems govern the use of content by describing per-user rights in machine-readable licenses and enforcing them by using cryptographic methods. The public's conception of the term "DRM" today does not extend beyond a copy-protection system of the content industry. DRM systems are seen as means to just restrict copying and sharing of multimedia content and are thus viewed negatively. Much of the negative impression comes from the fact that current systems offer very little transparency and convenience to the user. One way leading into the future for DRM could be to foster standardization for DRM and the introduction of trusted computing. Along those lines we propose an approach for DRM towards the introduction of a standardized license-processing core that is open to the public and common to a variety of DRM-related applications. We hope that the trusted environment, in which the DRM core and applications are executed, together with the open architecture, will help to introduce clarity and convenience in the DRM process and thus give a positive spin to the topic. © 2006 Springer Berlin · Heidelberg.