EDU-DRM: A Digital Rights Management (DRM) system for K-12 education

The technological achievements in digital publishing have made paperless education possible even in K-12 education. Aside from high bandwidth distribution infrastructure, main problems of digital publishing are preserving personal information and protecting the rights of copyrighted contents. Although, specially designed digital rights management (DRM) systems can be used to control distribution and usage of private and/or copyrighted contents in K-12 education, dealing with large number of bursty concurrent access requests and changing the access rights of large amount of students from one content class to another at the end of each education period makes the problem different from existing ones. This paper introduces a new DRM system, called EDU-DRM, that includes a novel bit based authorization approach that reduces the processing time for authorization requests and automatize the access right adjustments with predefined rules for K-12 education. During the study, an experimental framework is designed using Apache Bench to analyze the proposed approach and its evaluation. The system is compared with XML based authorization approach and the results are presented in the paper.