Overview of DRM for Digital Rights Management

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a new technology that has developed with the widespread distribution of electronic audio-video programs over the Internet. Its purpose is to protect the copyright of digital media, to technically prevent illegal copying of digital media, or to make copying difficult to a certain extent, and end users must be authorized to use digital media.

Data encryption and copy prevention are the core technologies of DRM, a DRM system needs to first establish a digital media authorization center (Rights Issuer, RI), encoding has been compressed digital media, and then encrypted using the key to protect the content, the encrypted digital media header stores the KeyID and the Uniform ResourceLocator of the program authorization center ( Uniform ResourceLocator (URL) address of the program authorization center. Users on demand, according to the program head of KeyID and URL information, through the digital media authorization center of the verification of the authorization to send the relevant key decryption, digital media can be used. The digital media to be protected is encrypted, and even if it is downloaded and saved by the user and distributed to others, it cannot be used without the verification and authorization of the Digital Media Authorization Center, thus closely protecting the copyright of the digital media.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a new technology proposed for digital media copyright protection in the network environment, and generally has the following six functions:

(1) Digital Media Encryption: Packaging and encrypting the original digital media for safe and reliable network transmission.

(2) Blocking illegal content registration: preventing illegal digital media from obtaining legal registration and thus entering network circulation.

(3) User Environment Detection: Detecting the behavioral environment such as hardware information of the user's host so as to enter the user's legitimacy authentication.

(4) User behavior monitoring: real-time tracking and monitoring of the user's operating behavior to prevent illegal operation.

(5) authentication mechanism: identification of legitimate users and authorize the behavioral rights of digital media.

(6) Payment mechanism and storage management: including the storage management of the digital media itself and the packaged files, metadata (keys, licenses) and other data information (e.g., digital watermarks and fingerprint information).

DRM technology can undoubtedly provide sufficient security for the copyright of digital media. However, it requires the combination of the user's decryption key with local computer hardware, and it is clear that the shortcomings of this approach are very obvious to the user, because the user can only get the subscribed service on a specific computer in a specific location. With the continuous development of computer networks, the mode and topology of the network are also changing, and the traditional DRM technology based on C/S mode needs to give different solutions to realize a reasonable migration when facing different network modes, which is also a subject for further research and exploration of DRM technology.