SDMI-based rights management systems

Building digital rights management (DRM) systems for electronic commerce is still a complex task because such systems are usually required to manage a large set of different media contents, rights information, and enabling technologies. The Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI) was proposed to provide a secure environment in which rights management is performed for music distribution through the Internet. Rights management in SDMI is implemented by digital watermarking, but it is not the responsibility of SDMI to provide guidelines for the design of digital watermarks and to explore other potential benefits of using digital watermarks for the music distribution business. This paper fills this gap by proposing an SDMI-based rights management system. The proposed rights management system can support basic SDMI functions and non-SDMI features such as video. A prototype of the SDMI-based rights management system has been developed and the interfaces of the major components are presented. D 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.