Digital Rights Protection Management of Web Portals Content

Without doubt one of the most important factors that contributed to the wide acceptance and popularity of Web portals is the potential for users to access a broad spectrum of information from a single access point, the Web portal itself. A Web portal, in such a way, aggregates information from multiple sources and makes that information available to various users. Regardless of whether the offered assets are hosted within the Web portal or whether the latter serves as a gateway to information services and resources located on the rest of the Internet, a Web portal is simultaneously an all-in-one Web site and a browsing guide to all available Internet information worldwide. Even though there is no definite taxonomy of portals, relevant labels such as government, community, enterprise, general and others are offered aiming at defining the Web portal with respect to its content and its target group. Summarizing, it could be assumed that a Web portal offers centralized access to all relevant content and applications (Tatnall, 2005). On the other hand, the ability to create, host and distribute digital material, one of the key features of digital technology that a Web portal utilizes and derives its huge success from, proved to be a double edged sword since it allowed zero cost reproduction of the digital material for purposes of piracy. Piracy of relevant digital material offered by a Web portal is common today and it has posed significant problems in terms of financial losses to the owners of digital content that is offered through it. This explains why the owners of digital content hesitate to place their work on a Web portal where they may be illegally copied and distributed. Nonetheless, the advantages of adopting this idea and applying it securely in practice are considerable from both customer and owner perspectives. That is why effective copyright protection techniques must be employed in order to convince the owners of digital material to allow their assets to be hosted on the Internet and especially on Web portals. The latter are highly attractive to the new world and are considered to be the meeting point for all technologically oriented people with a mind to purchase something. This is where digital rights management (DRM) comes into play, employing a set of technical means to control illegal distribution of the aforementioned material and to protect the intellectual property of the original owners (Guenette, Gussin, & Trippe, 2001). Furthermore DRM aims to protect the rights of the users who legitimately purchased the digital material from the original owners. This article surveys the most effective watermarking techniques available for every multimedia and database entry that requires copyright protection within a Web portal. Subsequently, the most commonly encountered code obfuscation methods for software objects will be discussed. The conclusion will present views for the future of DRM in the territory of Web portal applications.