Research On Rational Sharing Of Digital Content

With the development of digital technology and telecommunication networks, ithas been easier to utilize digital content via smart terminals and networks. As the digitalcontent is easy to be reproduced and spread without damage, if the management andprotection of digital content is insufficient, there will be lots of pirated products andnonstandard utility of digital content, which will result in a huge strike on the industryof digital content and then will finally influence the worldwide development ofeconomy and culture. Under this circumstance, Digital Rights Management (DRM)arose. DRM is the collection of all the hardware or software technologies relating to theprotection of the intellectual property of digital content and is used to guarantee thelegitimate utility (including the processes of description, identification, trade, protection,monitoring, tracing and so on) during the whole life-time of digital content.In order to maintain the profits of digital content providers, all traditional DRMsystems introduced strict protection methods to limit the sharing of digital content.However, these systems would inevitably cause damages to the benefits of the users,such as inconvenience of utility, leak of privacy, etc., which could lower the level ofsatisfaction with these systems and dampen the development of them. As a result, withthe goal of promoting the acceptability of DRM systems and handling the beneficialconflict between providers and users, the win-win and appropriate digital contentsharing mechanism is becoming a new research hotpot.Based on the analysis of beneficial relationships of DRM value chains, this paperprovides a proper sharing strategy and a series of models which can make full use ofthis strategy from the aspect of exploring the proper strategies and methods of digitalcontent. The main contributions are as follows::1. Provide a DRM control model based on game theory and a proper sharing strategyfor digital content: The controllers of the game choose a strategy based on theglobal optimization goals and force the players in control to choose the strategiesaccording to their own benefit optimization. In this way, the global control ofoptimization could be achieved. On basis of this, we have built the DRM gamecontrol model and work out a proper sharing strategy by analyzing the influence ofthe sharing strategy on the profits of providers and users.2. Provide a sharing model of digital content based on proxy re-encryption: Thismodel makes the sharing process as a process of proxy re-encryption by whichsharing digital content among any legitimate devices would be achieved withoutauthorized domain first. Meanwhile, the content providers could also dynamically know of the amount of devices that share digital content.3. Provide an off-line sharing model of digital content: This model introduces aprogram which can only be executed for appointed number of times to generate thedata for sharing in need and by this means, the content providers could set themaximum number of devices which are able to share the digital content. Also in theprocess of sharing, there is no need for users to interact with the providers.4. Provide a multilayered sharing model of digital content based on attribute-basedencryption: With this model, the content providers could control the digital contentto be shared among the appointed devices and in this way the providers are able toflexibly manage the amount of devices that share the specific digital content inauthorized domain. Users could logically build authorized sub-domain that isrelated to corresponding attributes in the whole authorized domain. When buyingdigital content, users would be offered the license encrypted with the domainattribute by the providers. As a result, only those sub-domains who have bought thedigital content have the ability to use it.