Special Issue on Enabling Security Technologies for Digital Rights Management

Modern advancements in communication infrastructure, signal processing, and digital storage technologies have enabled pervasive digital media distribution. Digital distribution allows the introduction of flexible, cost-effective business models that are advantageous to multimedia commerce transactions. The digital nature of the information also enables individuals to manipulate, duplicate, or access media beyond the conditions agreed upon for a given transaction. The latter issue has resulted in tremendous concern by content vendors. The large-scale success of legal digital media distribution rests, in part, on its ability to provide legitimate services to all parties. This requires allowing consumers convenient use of digital media while equitably compensating other members of the distribution chain such as content creators, aggregators and vendors. Digital rights management (DRM) has been proposed to address these issues. DRM is the digital management of user rights to content. It links specific user rights to media in order to provide persistent governance of user activities such as viewing, duplication, and access. Ideally, a DRM system balances information protection, usability, and cost to provide a beneficial environment for all parties; this includes expanded functionality, cost effectiveness and new marketing opportunities. Overall, management is achieved through the interaction of effective economic models, social values, legal policy, and technology. At the technological level, DRM systems incorporate encryption, copy control, tagging, tracing, conditional access, and media identification. The challenge is to engineer secure systems in an environment of dynamic applications and standards for which appropriate business models and consumer expectations are only now being identified. Furthermore, controversy over the ability of DRM to create atypical licensing policies and provide more control to content vendors than traditionally accepted practices has stirred much debate on the technology. The goal of this Special Issue is to provide some principal tutorial papers and novel research contributions in the area of DRM technologies. Our objectives are to present an