An effective and dynamically extensible DRM web platform

Abstract

The digital rights management platforms (DRMps) are the web platforms employed by web content providers (CPs) to ensure the copyright protection of the digital contents they distribute on the Internet. However, the current DRMps that employ watermarking technologies to protect multimedia digital contents implement "centralized" service models in which the protection process is directly implemented by the managers of the DRMps, i.e. CPs, which are also the copyright owners. This has given rise to documented problems that nowadays affect the DRMps and make their use difficult in a web context. This paper presents a DRMp characterized by a distributed architecture that enables CPs to exploit copyright protection services supplied by web service providers (SPs) according to protection processes controlled by trusted third parties (TTPs). The proposed approach exploits web-oriented programming technologies to enable CPs and SPs to dynamically cooperate in the protection process without imposing a tight coupling among them. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.