Digital Music Electronic Commerce - Addressing the Super Distribution Model

Music is from far one of the most important types of media that is being exchanged in today's open networks. Users, pushed by a growing number of factors are exchanging more and more music files using popular P2P sharing technologies, such as Kazaa, e-Mule or Gnutella. If from one side this fact is important and positive, from the other side it is driving to a growth in the number of piracy situations, related to the violation of the authors copyright. Super distribution is from far the most popular electronic business model on the Internet and the World Wide Web. This is especially true when digital formatted content, such as music, videos or even books are considered. What are the main reasons for these facts? Because it works. This paper proposes an approach to address such IPR issues trough the usage of an open DRM architecture. 1 SUPER-DISTRIBUTION The tremendous potential of “super-distribution” on the Internet has been demonstrated by the peer-topeer file sharing systems, such as Napster and Gnutella. To date, this technique has mainly been limited to illegal distribution of copyrighted material by communities of Internet users, although it is now also being used legitimately by media companies for advertising and to promote products/services. Whilst super-distribution has shown its tremendous potential, this e-commerce model has yet to achieve commercially sustainable revenues, mainly due to the lack of any mechanisms for content protection and payment for licensed material. Superdistribution and peer-to-peer technologies have therefore initially been used mainly for the illegal distribution and copying of copyrighted material. However, once a licensing scheme has been adopted and interoperability issues have been addressed, super-distribution is likely to be one of the key techniques used to promote and sell digital media (Bill, 2003). 2 OPENSDRM DESCRIPTION OpenSDRM deploys a traditional DRM solution for content rights protection (Siegert, Serrão, 2003) that can be applied for publishing and trading of digital multimedia content. Additionally, the security architecture proposed started from the OPIMA international specifications (IEC/ITA, 2000), MPEG-4 IPMP Extensions (King, Kudumakis, 2001) (Lacy, Rump, Kudumakis, 1998) and the emerging MPEG-21 IPMP architecture (Bormans, Hill, 2002) as well as with some of the proposals for JPEG2000 standard Part 8 – JPSEC – JPEG2000 security (Kudumakis, 2003). This DRM solution is composed of several optional elements covering the content distribution value chain, from content production to content usage. It covers several major aspects of the content distribution and trading: content production, preparation and registration, content, interactive content distribution, content negotiation and acquisition, strong actors and user’s authentication and conditional visualization/playback (EC, 2002). OpenSDRM is composed by a set of external and internal components which interact with each other. The components and actors that interact externally with the OpenSDRM architecture (Serrão, Neves, Barker, Balestri, Kudumakis, 2003) are: User, IPMP Tools Provider, Content Provider, Payment Infrastructure and Certification Authority. The internal components of the OpenSDRM platform and the corresponding interfaces are: Media Application, Media Delivery Server, 375 Serrao C. and Marques J. (2004). DIGITAL MUSIC ELECTRONIC COMMERCE – Addressing the super distribution model. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on E-Business and Telecommunication Networks, pages 375-378 DOI: 10.5220/0001389803750378 Copyright c © SciTePress Commerce Server, Authentication Server, License Server, IPMP Tools Server, Registration Server, Content Preparation Server and the Payment Gateway. 3 SUPER-DISTRIBUTION IN