Research On Digital Rights Management And Its Application To Video On Demand

With the development of Internet and multimedia, the media commerce is booming, which bargains multimedia via the Internet. Recently, MPEG-21 multimedia framework unified the access to various media formats in the Internet, which is called UMA (Universal Media Access). DRM (Digital Rights Management) is one of the most important aspects in UMA.DRM is a series of software, hardware and services that can identify, describe, monitor, implement and manage the digital rights in the whole lifecycle of the digital works. It is a synthetical implementation of various information security techniques. Being capable of controlling the rights of digital works in its whole lifecycle, it attracts more and more attention in the rights preservation field. Thanks to the increasingly wide spread of broad-bandwidth Internet, DRM applied to the Internet is becoming a focus in the DRM researching field.First,this thesis analyses features of E-Commerce and proposes the concept of Media-Commerce by integrating these features with MPEG-21 multimedia framework.Second, this thesis performs a comparative study of two popular rights expression languages: XrML and MPEG-REL. Through this study, it is found that MPEG-REL is born to be more suitable for multimedia rights expression. Thus it is the choice in this thesis.Third, this thesis implements a DRM subsystem for a KTV VOD system, which is based on the deep analysis of the rights transfer process in the VOD's value chain. In this subsystem, rights are expressed in a self-defined mode.Finally, this thesis presents the architecture for Internet based VOD DRM according to the development tendency of VOD. In this architecture, MPEG-REL enables the interoperability between different DRM systems.