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CW 428
Sam Michiels, Wouter Joosen, Eddy Truyen, and Kristof Verslype
Digital rights management - a survey of existing technologies
Abstract
Systems that provide Digital Rights Management (DRM) are highly complex and extensive: DRM technologies must support a diversity of devices, users, platforms, and media, and a wide variety of system requirements concerning security, flexibility, and manageability. This complexity and extensiveness poses major challenges to DRM development due to fragmentation of individual solutions, limited reuse and interoperability of DRM systems, and lack of a domain-specific structure that supports and guides the design and implementation of DRM systems and their applications. In order to handle these challenges in an effective and efficient way, we need to understand the DRM context and the internal structure of current DRM solutions. This report presents (1) an easy to understand introduction to DRM by proposing a high level architectural view, (2) an overview of the most important DRM technologies, both proprietary point solutions and open standards, and their mapping onto the architectural view, (3) an overview of the most important rights enforcement and interpretation technologies, and (4) a discussion on the evolution of DRM that can be expected in the near future. Identifying key DRM services and rights enforcement technologies, and locating them in an overall architecture brings us one step closer to a software architecture for DRM.
report.pdf (1.6M) / mailto: S. Michiels