SLDRM: A self local license digital rights management system

Abstract

Digital rights management (DRM) systems try to protect copyrights and digital contents by limiting access by users to contents. They provide facilities for electronic publishers to distribute their precious contents to prevent any illegal distribution and usage. Existing DRM systems fall short in protecting data ownerships in its life cycle (creation, distribution and updates), providing DRM systems for current software and systems, data/license distribution and hassles for users. This paper proposes a new system for management of digital rights. It supports the enforcement of a wide range of limitations on accessing protected files and advanced digital right management system to protect ownerships while new files are created from protected files. The main novelty of the proposed DRM system lies in using a self local license management system instead of license/content distribution servers, so that users are able to access protected contents offline. This system also enables us to implement DRM systems for current software and data types without need to make any changes in their codes and structures. An implementation based on this system has been developed for and applied to Adobe Acrobat Reader (as the sample target software) and PDF files (as the sample data type). Our evaluations demonstrated that, unlike current DRM architectures and implementations, SLDRM satisfies owner rights as well as user rights by license server independency, data output authorization, data lifecycle protection, machine dependency, virtual machine detection, ability to apply DRM without changes in target software codes and data type/structures.