SmartContent: A Self-Protecting and Context-Aware Active Content

The development of communications systems in general, and the Internet in particular, has given billions of people the opportunity to connect and share content with audiences to which they would otherwise never have had access to. Nowadays, anyone can publish and share content, whether personal or not, on the Internet. In addition, the ubiquitous ness of mobile devices makes it possible to access content anywhere, at anytime on different platforms. All of this often leads to situations of potential intentional or unintentional misuse of contents as well as privacy problems. Traditional solutions for these problems such as Digital Rights Management have proven not to be appropriate because they rely heavily on costly and centralized external systems or infrastructure. In this paper, we propose Smart Content, a novel approach for content protection and privacy. Smart Content acts autonomously and embeds with the content the notion of context and policy. This article presents the general model of Smart Content and an example implementation.