An MPEG-4 IPMP Compatible Digital Rights Management System

In last decades, digital technology has advanced dramatically, and the growing amount of digital content makes managing and protecting the rights of content more and more difficult. Though it is clear that related industries shall develop their own digital rights management systems, performing duplicate jobs in each company is undoubtedly a waste. In this thesis, a common interface between the devices, services and contents is defined according to related standards. Under this interface, industry can develop proprietary digital rights management tools and mechanisms without losing the compatibility.
We propose and implement an MPEG-4 Intellectual Property Management and Protection (IPMP) compliant digital rights management system, including a web-based server for the client to request for browsing the digital content by HTTP protocol and a user-friendly rendering application for all the users. The Certificate Authority maintains the trust architecture and user identities. To distinguish different digital contents, Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is utilized. All the available rights expression is described by Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL). Blowfish encryption algorithm is adopted to protect digital contents from unlicensed access and distribution over the Internet, but it also adds little overhead on video decoding. A video watermarking scheme based on content characteristic makes up the “analog hole” and enhances the reliability of our system. Experiments simulating the piracy in the theater are performed and the system performance is evaluated and analyzed.