Introduction to the Proposed DRM System

Digital rights management (DRM) system is an important component of a digital asset management system, which manages the rights of the individuals/parties involved in the creation and transaction of digital assets. The parties involved in digital asset creation and transaction are creators, owners, distributors and sub-distributors and consumers. Most of the research in DRM focuses on developing techniques for supporting copyright concerns of owners/copyright holders and the digital rights concerns of consumers only and hardly looks at the concerns of distributors and sub-distributors who play important roles in digital asset delivery chain. Therefore, we would like to develop techniques for supporting digital rights concerns of distributors and sub-distributors in addition to digital right rights concerns of owners and consumers, thus support a multiparty multilevel DRM system.

A DRM system should be designed to prevent the rights violations by each of these individuals/parties. Or, in case of violation of rights by any individual/party the violation should be detected and the right violating individual/party should be identified. Owners are mainly concerned about the loss in revenue due to the copyright violations by consumers and distributors. While the main concerns of consumers and distributors are fairness, false implication concerns, privacy etc. DRM systems infact intend to mitigate all these concerns and provide confidence to all parties.