Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
12.2 A Network for Copyright Management and Control
of Private Information
12.2.1 Background
Since the quality of digital content does not deteriorate with repeated copies,
copyright protection is an important issue. To handle this issue, digital rights
management (DRM) has been applied to securely deliver the contents and create
secondary content quoted partially from various sources. However, DRM has not
effectively dealt with an arbitration process. Moreover, conventional technologies
are inflexible to control the use of copyright materials. In some cases, access to
reference data in the content or data transfer is restricted when they are permitted
under the copyright law. This could deprive users of the right to access. The
distribution infrastructure through license agreement has improved in terms of
checking copyright and licensing materials based on DRM. However, many license
restrictions still make no allowance for any changes.
The system structures we are looking at are: (a) database management agent with
the extended Dublin Core and access control list, (b) contents capsules containing
software agents that control copyrights and access authorization, and (c) user
agents. Copyright material is stored in the database. We apply the existing access
control technologies to the database management agent in order to read and write
data to the database (Yamada et al.
2007
).
This system is expected to increase the convenience of content access. Further-
more, introducing the agent technology allows a negotiation to take place between
capsule agent and access control agent for users. This will bring various
advantages: for example, reducing network traffic; improving response; inspecting
the sufficiency of rights; developing an efficient
inference mechanism; and
mediating complicated rights issues in n-dimensions.
On the other hand, protection and control of private information are serious
problems in the IT enabled networks. We can also apply these methods to treat private
information because access control mechanisms are efficient to protect the privacy of
information. However, one of the problems of these systems is routing mechanism.
Moreover, users sometimes want to use contents anonymously. On the other hand, an
owner and a distributor of contents or private information want to check its integrity,
update the information, and change the access rights. Because of these reasons, they
communicate with each other anonymously.
In this chapter, we describe the network which is suitable for the distribution of
content with DRM and for the distribution of private information controlled by the
involved parties. In addition, an anonymous routing method with a mechanism to
find the position of distributed data has been proposed.
