Designing a DRM System

The digital rights management (DRM) systems aim at protecting and enforcing the legal rights associated with the use of digital content distributed on the Internet. Most of such systems use watermarking techniques to implement the content protection. Although the effectiveness of the implemented protection strictly depends on the adopted watermarking techniques, an important role is also played by watermarking protocols. They define the scheme of the interactions that have to take place among the entities involved in the processes of content protection and Web-based distribution governed by the DRM systems. This paper presents a DRM system developed as a Web software platform to implement the copyright protection of multimedia digital content distributed on the Internet. The DRM system is based on a watermarking protocol previously developed by the authors, and has been designed as a service oriented architecture composed of a federation of coordinated Web entities that play distinct roles and interact within a trusted environment.