Reducing Unauthorized Content Distribution with Monitoring

A digital rights management (DRM) system grants specific rights for content use to a user. Such rights may however exclude desired but legal content use and thus cause inconvenience for the user. Moreover, unauthorized content distribution via peer-to-peer (P2P) networks occurs. In this paper, we explore user-enabled monitoring to give users more freedom in content use and to discourage unauthorized content distribution. The monitor is placed at the interface between the user's device(s) and the public Internet. With the monitor, the user cannot upload unauthorized content but as a tradeoff the user is offered benefits. Digital rights management; DRM; monitoring I. INTRODUCTION A typical digital rights management (DRM) system encrypts digital content with a secret key. A license protects and transports this key to a DRM client. The license also contains rights describing under which conditions the content may be used. The DRM client decrypts and renders the content if the conditions stated in the rights are met. These rights may sometimes be experienced as too restrictive and cause inconvenience to the users. Furthermore, there is unauthorized content distribution over the Internet especially via peer-to-peer (P2P) content distribution. In this paper, we explore user-enabled monitoring to reduce unauthorized content distribution and to provide more freedom of using the content. The main functionalities of the monitor are to block unauthorized upload of the content to the Internet and to tag the content downloaded from the Internet. The monitor does not block downloading to not annoy users. User-enabled monitoring provides an option to a user to voluntarily enable the monitor. When the user enables the monitor, the user can obtain benefits as a reward. Examples of benefits are discount for purchasing digital content, legalizing unauthorized content that the user has downloaded with a reasonable price, or free content management service such as backup. The monitor may (as an additional benefit) generate digital evidence (3) for the user to prove that the user was not involved in any unauthorized content distribution. We do not justify which of these benefits is the most effective and attractive to the users in this paper.