Effective Rights Exporting Process - Towards system interoperability of digital rights management

Abstract

Digitaalisten käyttöoikeuksien tehokas hallinta

Digitaalisten käyttöoikeuksien hallinta (Digital Rights Management, DRM) on joukko menetelmiä, joilla hallitaan digitaalisen sisällön käyttöä ja jakelua.

Eri menetelmien yhteen toimivuuden puute on hyvin todettu liiketoiminnallisesta, laillisesta ja teknologisesta näkökulmasta. Työn aihe, käyttöoikeuksien siirto, on keskinen DRM-järjestelmien järjestelmätason yhteen toimivuuden osa. Työssä kehitetään menetelmiä sellaisiin digitaalisten käyttöoikeuksien siirtoon, jotka siirtävät mahdollisimman suuren määrän käyttöoikeuksista järjestelmästä toiseen.

Effective Rights Exporting Process

Digitalization has changed the content industry. Digital content can be easily counterfeited. Moreover, with the help of the Internet the counterfeited content can be distributed at almost no cost. Digital Rights Management (DRM) was introduced to govern the usage and distribution of digital content. The reception of DRM has been mixed in the content industry. Lack of DRM interoperability has been well noted from business, legal, and technology perspectives. Solutions towards System interoperability of DRM promised to solve most of the issues related to the lack of DRM interoperability. Rights exporting, as a critical task of DRM system interoperability, is the main topic of this dissertation. This dissertation focuses on the effectiveness of rights exporting.

This dissertation started with a thorough literature review. Based on the previous research, a rights model was established to capture the essence of rights for rights exporting. Then algorithms like rights decomposition and rights adaptation were developed on top of rights model. By characterizing the rights exporting process, an input-output-process model was built to formalize the process framework of rights exporting. The principles of rights exporting were discovered to guide the results of rights exporting and to relatively measure the effectiveness of rights exporting. Along the iterations of process optimization, new algorithms were developed to address identified issues, such as passive condition pre-enforcement.

This dissertation results prove that rights exporting can be achieved with the process framework proposed. Moreover, with the help of developed algorithms, rights exporting can be performed in a more effective manner.