Idrm - interoperability mechanisms for open rights management platforms

Abstract

Today's digital technology is raising important challenges in the Intellectual Property(IP) field in general and to Copyright in particular. The same technology that has made possible the access to content in a ubiquitoys manner, available to evereyone in a simple and fast way, is also the main responsible for the challenges affecting the digital content I of our days. Technological solutions and legal frameworks were created to meet these new challenges. From the technological point of viewm Rights Management Systems (RMS) and Copy Protection Systems (CPS) have been developed and deployed to try to cope with them. At first, they seemed to work however, their closed and non-interoperable nature and a growing number of wrong strategic business decisions, soon lead to a strong opposition to them. One of the strongest negative points is the lack of rights management interoperability. The work presented on this thesis primarily addresses the RMS interoperability problems. The objective of the thesis is to present some possible mechanisms to improve the interoperability between the different existing and emerging rights management platforms, in particular to open rights management solutions. Several different possible directions to rights management interoperability are pointed in this thesis. One of the most important is openness. Interoperability between different rights management mechanisms can only be achieved if they are open up to a certain level. Based on this concept, an open rights management platform is designed and presented in this thesis. Also, some of the interoperability mechanisms are presented and explainde. This platform makes usage of the emerging service-oriented architectures to provide a set of distributed rights management services that could provide separtion of the different rights management functions, and that could be integrated with other functions from different providers.