A Digital Rights Management System for Educational Content Distribution

While delivering content via the Internet can be efficient and economical, content owners risk losing control of their intellectual property. Any business that wishes to control access to, and use of its intellectual property, is a potential user of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies. Traditional DRM has a passive one-way downstream consumption of content from producer to consumer focus primarily concerns digital rights enforcement. This model does not translate well to the education environment where openness, informal decision making, sharing of ideas, and decentralization are valued. Collaboration and multiple authorships are common in the educational environment, as is the repurposing and modification of digital content used for teaching and learning. A DRM system for educational content distribution must be substantially more sophisticated and flexible than what is available right now to gain support in the educational community.

Digital Fingerprinting Based Multimedia Content Distribution

In this chapter, the digital fingerprinting technology that is used to trace illegal distributors in multimedia content distribution is investigated. Firstly, the background and basic knowledge of digital fingerprinting- based multimedia distribution are reviewed. Then, some existing fingerprinting algorithms are introduced and compared. Additionally, the methods to embed the fingerprint securely are overviewed and analyzed. As an example, the secure audio distribution scheme is presented, and its performances are evaluated. Finally, some open issues and the future trends in digital fingerprinting are proposed. It is expected to provide valuable information to the students, engineers or researchers interested in this research topic.

Watermarking Techniques for DRM Applications

The need to safeguard the property rights of multimedia content from unauthorized copying and the possibility to determine the true owners of the asset can be faced by resorting to efficient digital watermarking systems. This chapter presents a mathematical formulation to define a digital watermarking system and describes the general requirements to be satisfied, with more emphasis given to the aspects of security, robustness, and imperceptibility. After this general discussion, the two main classes of digital watermarking schemes, namely the spread-spectrum watermarking and the side-informed watermarking are explained by highlighting their main advantages and drawbacks. This analysis is completed by the description of a practical implementation of a digital image watermarking scheme. Finally, the use of watermarking systems in the framework of a DRM is deeply analyzed.

Digital Rights Management in the Cultural Heritage Arena

Digital Rights Management (DRM) describes a set of functionalities which control access to, and the use of, copyright material. In particular, they focus on the acquisition of revenue from copyright material, and the prevention of its re-use and misuse in the online environment. This document describes the DRM system in the cultural heritage sector; the value of the DRMS to the content repositories and also to the end users is described. Managing digital rights is a focal point for any content provider.

An Advanced Watermarking Application for the Copyright Protection and Management of Digital Images of Cultural Heritage Case Study

The issue addressed in this chapter is the design, implementation, and evaluation of a watermarking application, especially focused on the protection of cultural heritage. The application described here is focusing on protecting digital surrogates of high-quality photographs of artifacts, monuments and sites, and on countering copyright infringement of online digital images. This is achieved by the integration of an innovative watermarking method to a specialized and usable user–interface. The system is specifically applied to “Ulysses,” the Official Cultural Portal of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture (HMC). The chapter is structured in 7 main sections where an overview of the issue is presented, the watermarking method is analyzed, and the user-interface is described in detail. Finally, an evaluation of the overall watermarking application is presented and specific on-site implementation issues are analyzed.

Digital Rights Management and E-Commerce Transactions

This chapter investigates intellectual property rights clearance of as part of e-commerce. Rights clearance is viewed as another online transaction that introduces certain technological and organizational challenges. An overview of the current intellectual property rights legislation is used to describe the setting in which business models and digital rights management systems are called to perform safe and fair electronic trade of goods. The chapter focuses on the technological aspects of the arising issues and investigates the potentials of using advanced information technology solutions for facilitating online rights clearance. A case study that presents a working online rights clearance and protection system is used to validate the applicability of the proposed approaches.

Digital Rights Management of Images and Videos Using Robust Replica Detection Techniques

Intellectual property rights protection and management of multimedia data is essential for the deployment of e-commerce systems involving transactions on such data. Lately, replica detection or fingerprinting has emerged as a promising approach for the rights management of multimedia data. In this chapter, a review of 2 replica detection techniques is presented. The first technique utilizes color-based descriptors, an R-tree indexing structure, and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) to achieve image replica detection. The second technique is a video fingerprinting method that utilizes information about the appearances of individuals in videos along with an efficient search and matching strategy.

Securing and Protecting the Copyright of Digital Video Through Watermarking Technologies

The basic principle of watermarking is the addition of the watermark signal to the host data that we wish to watermark. The addition is taking place in a way that the watermark signal is discreet and secure among the rest signals. Its retrieval, either partial or complete from the rest of signals, must be also possible only by using a secret key. In this chapter, we are going to deal with the digital video watermarking. First, we will name its applications, requirements, and the most important trends, then we will describe some of the most significant techniques of the specific process.

Watermarking and Authentication in JPEG2000

This chapter introduces JPEG 2000 as an application field for image authentication and the new technology of digital image watermarking. The new compression format has many unexplored characteristics that both the watermarking and the authentication communities should carefully take into account. Thus, a brief introduction to the standard is given at the beginning, discussing its structure, features, novelties, and capabilities. Following that introduction, watermarking techniques are presented, at first into the wavelet domain (the DWT is part of the JPEG2000 core), and then into the JPEG 2000 pipeline. The effects of the various standards’ parameters in this process are carefully investigated. Then, authentication mechanisms of JPEG 2000 images are described and we peek into JPSEC, part-8 of JPEG 2000 that deals with issues of watermarking and authentication.

Digital Rights Management

This chapter highlights the need for using copyright protection tools in our digital transactions. The main tools of copyright protection, such as cryptography, data hiding, and watermarking, along with the security framework where these tools can be used is also presented. However, all these tools and methods can be used only inside a specific technological and legal framework. This gap between technology and traditional human activities is bridged by developing the Digital Rights Management systems which is presented as a necessary mechanism to provide integrated e-services over the Internet. The legal framework and the current activities of organizations as WIPO (World Intellectual Property Rights Organization) is also provided in this chapter with the existing DRM technologies and the future research directions in this field