Sharing digital rights with domain licensing

Abstract

Sharing of multimedia content is a common practice that, combined with appropriate business models, need not be detrimental to the interests of content providers. Existing digital rights management systems, however, support only relatively limited sharing of content between multimedia terminals, resulting in inconvenience and frustration for end-users of rights-managed content. In this paper, we propose to combine the notion of an "authorised domain" with an "environment role" to permit end-users to share access to multimedia content within the constraints expressed in a domain licence. We describe how a variety of different business models can be supported using domain licences, and propose a preliminary domain expression language in which licences can be written. Finally, we demonstrate the practicality of our model by outlining how it could be implemented using the Open Mobile Alliance's specification for authorised domains together with a ubiquitous computing network. Our proposal provides greater expressive power than the base OMA DRM framework without requiring users to upgrade their devices.

Efficient and Enhanced Solutions for Content Sharing in DRM Systems

“…This is the classic DRM solution for content sharing, in which a group of authorized devices are defined as belonging to a joint domain, and devices within the same domain can freely share content between them. The studies [4,5] suggest improvements in the authorized domain model. Other studies do not assume that model: Sadeghi et al [6] provide a secure platform on open systems which allows the usage of dynamic licenses; Lee et al [7] propose a system for content sharing which relies on time-based rights.…”

Digital Rights Management

“…Other systems use the licence issuer as the domain controller [84], so that the rights-holder is able to determine directly what devices should be members of a domain. Some more recent authors have suggested that membership be controlled by some machine-readable policy transmitted from the rights-holder to the domain controller [72,101,77].…”

On logical domains for flexible content protection systems

“…At the moment the definitions of the domains are too connected to the physical world (a typical domain, for example, consists of the devices within one household or belonging to a single user [7]). The most popular approaches define a domain by the use of three primitivescardinality (a device can become a valid member of the domain if the overall number of devices in the domain does not exceed a given limit), time-outs (the membership in the domain is withdrawn after a certain time forcing the device to re-authorize), and proximity (confirms that the device is in a close range of the "domain holder").…”