Towards a Secure Copyright Protection Infrastructure for e-Education Material: Principles Learned from Experience

Copyright of e-Education material is valuable. The need for protecting it is prominent. In the past two years, we have developed an infrastructure called e-Course eXchange (eCX ) for protecting the copyrights of e-Courses, right from its development phase to its delivery phase. It has been adopted by an education institute, with a user-base of over 70,000 students, and has been receiving positive feedback from students. To design a secure and effective copyright protection infrastructure is not trivial. In particular, for efficiency purpose, one may allow students to retain a local copy of the e-Course material in their own computers; on the other hand, we should make it difficult for them to make illegal copies of the material. Only storing the material in encrypted form is not enough to protect the material. In this paper, we summarize some principles and knowledge we have gained through this project that should be observed for designing a secure copyright protection system. We believe that these principles would be useful to developers and researchers for designing and developing such a system.