Research On Mechanisms Of Digital Rights Protection For Standardized Learning Resources

It is important for the further development of educational informationlization to prompt the application of education resources and guarantee the profits of rights holders. Digital rights protection is an ideal method, and it is also a very essential field in digital content protection and information security. Promoting reuse and trade of learning objects, while protecting rights holders' profits are two key issues. Digital rights management for learning resources covers rights expression, authentication, trade, protection, monitor and trace of tangible and imtangible resources, including the relationships of rights holders. The main problems are some mechnisms of security, rights expression and rights enforcement. The research of this dissertation mainly focuses on intelligent properties of standardized learning resources and includes four issues: (1) Architecture and security protocol framework of digital rights managements for standardized learning resources; (2) Rights expression mechanism of learning resources; (3) Rights enforcement mechanism for learning resources; (4) Development and application of digital rights management schema for learning resources. The work in this Dissertation has been supported by the project ?°Digital Rights Management Technologies and Standards for Digital Media?±(No.2004AA119010-5), which is a sub-project of "Research on Encoding, Delivery, Testing and Application of Digital Video and Audio" project in the National 863 Plan, and supported by the project "Organization, Registery and Discovery of Learning Resources" (No.2001BA101A12), a sub-project of the "Key Technology and Demonstration Project of Network Learning" project in the 10th National Five Year Plan for Key Problem Tackling in Science and Technology. The contributions of this thesis include: 1. Research on secure protection architecture and secure protocols for standardized learning resources: Towards the problem between prompting reuse and trade of learning objects and protecting rights holders' profits, the dissertation studies digital rights management model and functional structure, builds up secure access protocol and authenticating protocols. By analyzing the security core of the model, security protocol framework is provided as follows: communication authenticating protocol channel and content authenticating protocol channel. The dissertation builds up a content container of learning resources, and provides content authenticating protocol. At the same time, according to properties of learning resources and the requirement of retrieval and management of licenses, a license authentication protocol and a license security transfer protocol are proposed and analyzed by formal logical methods. The result shows that our designed architecture and protocols can meet the requirements of online and offline management, as well as superdistribution of learning resources. 2. Research on rights expression of learning resources: Based on analyzing the properties and educational problems of e-learning technologies, reusable learning objects model is proposed by considering granularity, taxonomy and sequence of learning resources. The model "RLO-RKU" is two layers reusable learning object model. It improves the classic learning object model in granularity, taxonomy and navigator. Feasibility of the model is verified through an example. By considering protection granularity of learning resources and integration of learning objects and rights objects, the dissertation brings forward digital rights description model of learning resources and describes the model by integrating digital rights expression language into e-learning technology standards. By expressing the rights model, the dissertation analyses the properties and applications of two rights expression models. 3. Research on rights enforcement mechanism for learning resources: Existing researches on digital rights management of digital media are mainly based on a kind of media with non-standardized expressing methods. The dissertation proposes license model for learning resources by integrating rights objects and learning objects. It also studies rights enforcement models and license enforcement mechanisms. The case of rights enforcementproves the feasibility of rights enforcement mechanism. 4. Research on development and application of digital rights management for learning resources: Based on digital rights management model and relative strategies, two protection schemas for learning resources are proposed. The one is digital rights management of learning resources based on streaming media, which is applied to superdistribution model and live broadcast model. It has the features such as flexible management, synchronous browsing, live broadcast, and so on. The schema verifies the authenticating protocols. The schema is also applied in the Virtual Classroom Management System. The application testifies the strategies feasibility and operability. The other is digital rights management of learning resources based on Plug-in technologies. In the schema, license is stored in the server side. The method enhances the system security, reduces some risks in protection of learning resources. The schema is fitted for learning resources management and flexible commercial model. Parts of research achievements are adopted as the basic proposals of technologies and stardards of digital rights management by Audio-Video Standard organization of Ministry of Information Industry in china. At the same time, the research works are the important achievements of ?°specification of digital rights management for learning resources?±. These achievements will become important guides for building up secure architecture of digital rights management for standardized learning resources.