ARMS – A NEW APPROACH TO CONTROL CONTENT SHARING AND RIGHTS DISTRIBUTION

Learning and education place some very specific demands on the rights management such as attribution/authorship and content integrity authorship is most important in the learning content distribution. Many of the main content owners and creators (teachers, researchers,…) in the educational field intents to preserve mainly two IP basic rights: the authorship and content integrity. A content owner can grant permission to use content as long as he is properly acknowledged and with the assurances that the content is properly expressed and interpreted. Digital Rights Management (DRM) provides techniques and mechanisms, which congregates hardware and software to ensure the rights preservation of content providers against illegal usage. Modern DRM provides protected content to consumers adopting a license-based schema which separates the protection keys from encrypted content establishing an environment where the integrity of the license and the content confidentiality are assured to resist any modification.

As in other areas, one of the main issues the educational sector is related with content distribution and sharing. Ensuring that the terms and conditions stated by content owners on the license are respected by the other participants of the value chain, such as distributors(eg. teachers) or consumers (eg. students) is a concern. The assignment of licenses is a need in order to the distributor in the DRM system unambiguously communicate the licensing of the content giving an enhanced user experience. Not only is important to validate the issued license verifying if the terms and the conditions stated in the parental license are respected in the child license but also is important to verify if this license is generated to users that are in a controlled domain in the educational context.

In this paper we will describe our rights-sharing control mechanisms based in MPEG-21 standard that augments the control over a domain (the institution educational domain) through the validation of the license to be generated in a specific designed DRM system (ARMS –Academic Rights Management System). This system allows content owners to control which users can obtain a license within the constraints imposed by him, giving them the power to control the content usage in the educational domain. To enable this feature some special control mechanisms are developed in order to control the license issuance. For example, if a teacher wants a content be distributed to students in a specific course the mechanism will verify if the students satisfies that condition before generate a usage license. We will describe how our mechanisms maps to a variety of sharing scenarios and derive the context information required to implement these scenarios. Also we demonstrate the practicality of our model enabled by ARMS by outlining how it could be implemented using MPEG-21. In this DRM system some cryptographic tools are used to preserve content integrity and also digital signatures to preserve rights authorship. Also with the verification mechanisms mentioned is possible to make the license distributor acts like a domain controller regulating the issuance of licenses in the educational context. Our proposal, when applied in the educational domain, greatly increases the expressive power of digital rights management framework without requiring an upgrade to end-user devices.