Applying Web Oriented Technologies to Implement an Adaptive Spread Spectrum Watermarking Procedure and a Flexible DRM Platform

The advances in multimedia technologies have created opportunities for Internet pirates, who can copy multimedia documents and illegally distribute them, thus violating the legal rights of document owners or web content providers. Such a situation is an actual threat particularly for web content providers, which often have neither the technical competence nor the economical advantage to directly implement effective security services to combat the unauthorized trading of their distributed multimedia documents. This paper shows how known and widespread web oriented technologies can be exploited to develop a simplified but flexible digital rights management web platform. In particular, XML based technologies are used to implement an “on buyer”, adaptive watermarking procedure, while web services are used to implement a web platform by which web service providers can supply copyright protection services on behalf of web content providers in a secure network context. Thus, content providers that exploit the proposed platform can take advantage of a copyright protection system acting as a trusted third party without having to directly implement it. On the other hand, service providers can follow the proposed XML based approach to implement fully in the W3C XSLT language complex watermarking procedures without having to interface native codes with web services frameworks commonly used to develop web platforms.