In the future, intellectual property protection will be a need for distributed media in mobile multimedia. With the constraints of mobile commerce and mobile technologies such as limited bandwidth and computing capability, new schemes of rights management emerge. Digital rights management (DRM) operations in these schemes differ from those in existing DRM solutions for electronic commerce. This chapter presents a general DRM framework for mobile multimedia based on current DRM, mobile network, mobile device, and payment technologies. The framework is partially referenced to the NTT DoCoMo i-mode model, which centralizes payment and maintains user information within the service center. This chapter also presents the basic operations of the general framework and illustrates how rights insertion, rights enforcement, and music sharing are realized under the framework.
