Research On Usage Control And Copyright Identification Scheme For Learning Resources

With the further development of education informationization, the copyright protection issues of digital learning resources have become an urgent problem to be solved. Rights management for learning resources is an innovative application of digital rights management technology. With the help of technological tools, we can put intellectual property laws and various copyright protocols into effect, and also provide much more effective and reasonable protection for quality learning resources. All those could help the copyright holders and the legal users to protect their lawful rights and interests.Due to the limitations of the digital rights management technology, along with the new challenges brought by the domain characteristics of education reality, new digital rights management mechanisms for education application area are need to be studied.Based on our project research work and amounts of research literature references, this dissertation takes an in-depth research on digital rights management key mechanisms for learning resources, which include:(1) research on learning resources digital rights management architecture framework and functional structure;(2) research on rights management-enabled content information model and secure packaging mechanism for learning resources;(3) research on digital rights usage control mechanism for learning resources;(4) research on copyright identification and usage tracing protocols for learning resources;(5) design and implementation of digital rights management system for learning resources. The research focuses of this dissertation are digital rights usage control mechanism and copyrights identification and usage tracing protocols.This dissertation conducts a series of research and has obtained the following innovative achievements:First of all, since most of existing digital rights management architecture frameworks focus on the usage control of authorized user’s rights, which makes them lack of description and coverage of copyright identification functions. A novel concept of learning resource lifecycle was presented. And based on the concept, the learning resources digital rights management architecture framework and functional structure which can cover the whole learning resource lifecycle are proposed.Secondly, since the existing content packaging method barely support nested protection for learning resources, on the basis of learning object metadata (LOM) and content packaging (CP) standards, the rights management-enabled learning resources information model and secure packaging mechanism is studied. Unlike existing content packaging technique, the proposed mechanism can separately provide protection for each content item in a learning resource file. It is much more suitable for compounded, heterogeneous reusable learning resources, and could provide a secure foundation for flexible authorization of digital rights.Thirdly, since most of existing learning resources access control mechanisms are based on traditional access control policy which can’t provide fine-grained authorization and the usage processes are lack of persistent control, Based on Ravi Sandhu’s UCONABC model, an attribute-policy based usage control (AP-UCON) model and its enforcement mechanism is proposed. The innovative achievement are as follows:(1) The "oBligation" factor is combined into the "Condition" decision factor, and the "Exception" factor is introduced into the model to describe the "fair use" use case, which is quite common in education research field;(2) The security policy confliction problems brought by the nested packaging of learning resources in the content creation stage are analyzed, and a consistent policy creation algorithm is presented;(3) Based on the concept of reference monitor, an AP-UCON client engine mechanism is proposed, which is proved to be very useful to perform the authorization decision and digital rights usage control enforcement.Then, to resolve the piracy and illegal usage issues of learning resources, a series of learning resource copyright ownership identification (CIOP) and usage tracing (UTP) protocols are proposed. Beyond the basic security objectives of security protocol, the proposed protocol mechanism has the following innovative achievement:(1) In the CIOP protocol, a trusted third party embeds robust copyright watermark into learning resources work in the creation/publishing stage with the help of timestamp scheme, to make sure that even the watermark is removed, the copyright ownership can still be identified and proved;(2) In the UTP protocol, user’s digital fingerprint is added to a copy of learning resources work in the distribution stage. To ensure honest user’s anonymity and traitor’s traceability, a new anonymous public-private key pair is presented and the performance is improved.Finally, several digital rights management system tools are designed and implemented based on the researches mentioned above, and the secure mechanisms of those system tools and discussed.The research achievements can be used in e-Learning, digital libraries, knowledge management, e-commerce and other information content services areas, and is conducive to the establishment of lifelong education services platform with digital rights management services.