A Comparative Study Of Digital Rights Management (drm) Technology Standards

The freshly new digital and Internet environment of our information era have posed great threat to the so-called copyright. DRM (Digital Rights Management) is a new technology emerged in recent years which is seen as a solution to the digital copyright. DRM is different from the ever widely used limitation by encryption or access control methodology in that, it makes efforts to balance between intellectual property protection and the prompt acquisition of information. It enables new e-commerce models for digital content, trying out to reach a win-win result through that.This paper conducts a comparative research to DRM technologies. First it gives an overview to the background, typical definitions, as well as international and domestic progress of DRM. It shows the gap between international and domestic DRM application, and lists the value of this comparative research. After that, a brief introduction to several former techniques which bases DRM and two different DRM architecture models are also presented.Requirement analysis is critical to every information system, and that has no exception for DRM. It is not easy to recognize or understand those requirements because they are always variable and implicit. This paper lists DRM requirements from five standardization groups-W3C, AAP, MPEG, OeBF, OASIS, as well as make a comparison to them from several angles.Rights Expression Language is a key part of DRM. ODRL and XrML are two major competing REL. This paper shows the similarity and difference of these two from many aspects, such as their core concepts, fidelity to the expressed DRM requirements, layer of presentation, eligibility, maturity, extensibility, market performance, and patent limitation. By the way, give an overview to some other typical DRM languages.There are two major applications for DRM, namely eBooks and video/audios. The designs and system features of five leading DRM products, including EBX, Adobe, Apabi of Founder Electronics, Microsoft Windows Media DRM, and Real Helix DRM are briefly listed.As a result of this comparison research, this paper presents the drawbacks of current DRM techniques and products, poses several paradoxes which have to be confronted for a better DRM solution, indicates the outlook of future DRM. An abstract framework of Rights Expression Language is proposed to add more flexibility and interoperability. Also, measures are suggested to be taken as next step for us dealing with the unfavorable situation.