MPEG-4 IPMP Extension

To ensure secure content delivery, the Motion Picture Experts Group, MPEG, has dedicated significant effort to the DRM (Digital Rights Management) issues. MPEG is now moving from defining only hooks to proprietary systems (e.g., in MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Version 1) to specifying a more encompassing standard in Intellectual Property Management and Protection (IPMP). MPEG feels that this is necessary in order to achieve MPEG’s most important goal: interoperability. The design of the IPMP Extension framework also considers the complexity of the MPEG-4 standard and the diversity of its applications. This architecture leaves the details of the design of IPMP tools in the hands of applications developers, while ensuring the maximum flexibility and security. This paper first briefly describes the background of the development of the MPEG-4 IPMP Extension. It then presents an overview of the MPEG-4 IPMP Extension, including the architecture of MPEG-4 IPMP Extension, the flexible protection signaling, and the secure messaging framework for the communication between the terminal and the tools. Two sample usage scenarios are also provided to illustrate how a MPEG-4 IPMP extension compliant system works. 1. Background and Introduction 1.1 Problems in the Existing DRM Market With the advent of digital technologies, many new market opportunities have emerged for content owners, content distributors, and consumer electronics/information technology industries. An essential requirement for developing a thriving marketplace is the protection of copyrighted content in digital form. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a technology that has been developed to protect against the illegal distribution of copyrighted digital content such as music, video or documents. However, there are some problems remained to be solved in the existing DRM market 1 Authors of this paper have been actively involved in the standardization of MPEG-4 IPMP Extension, and have made significant contribution to the IPMP Extension standards. To appear in EURASIP JASP, final manuscript MSRM.107 The first problem is the lack of interoperability. Different content providers tend to use different protection mechanisms (hence, different DRM systems) to protect and distribute the content. For example, Content Provider A may prefer to use the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) [15] for encryption, while Content Provider B may prefer to use his own proprietary encryption tool. This results in the lack of interoperability as illustrated in Fig. 1, where Terminal A can not play back content distributed by Content Provider B, and vice versa.