Digital rights management system with user privacy, usage transparency, and superdistribution support

In the modern world, digital content has been massively produced, distributed, and consumed by human beings; consequently, how to protect the rights and benefits of content consumers, producers, and distributors has become a crucial issue. One promising solution is to design a full-fledged digital rights management (DRM) system. In this study we introduce a new design on the digital rights management system providing user privacy, usage transparency, and superdistribution. A comprehensive set of DRM processing functions and corresponding mechanisms are developed in our system to support various business process requirements. Superdistribution support is embedded in our system design. A prototype is implemented to verify our system design. To protect consumer privacy, a temporary identity is generated for each consumer using the KryptoKnight protocol. Elliptic curve cryptography-based encryption scheme is adopted for messages transmitted among servers and client over an unsecure communication channel. For usage transparency, a user-friendly DRM client package (software) is introduced in the proposed DRM system to achieve content protection and support user convenience in usage. Copyright (C) 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.