Broker-Based Secure Negotiation of Intellectual Property Rights

In the area of e-commerce of multimedia content, protection and management of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) is a key issue. Using a broker as intermediary between copyrighted material purchasers and content providers helps, apart from increasing the market perspectives, to improve the way of handling the IPR aspects. The conditions in which multimedia content is sold may vary from one case to another, especially in a B2B environment. For this reason, negotiation of copyright conditions at the purchase moment is to become more and more important. We are developing an application that represents IPR information using metadata and uses a specific protocol for negotiation purposes. All of this in a broker-based multimedia content e-commerce system. We are also experimenting with the use of agent technology to implement the negotiation protocol. The result of the negotiation is an electronic contract, that should be signed by the interested parties. Apart form specifying this data structure, we are working in the integration of an electronic signature mechanism using the XML Signature specification.1 1 IPR Business Models During the last years, a lot of work has been done in the area of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) management, that includes copyright protection and Electronic Copyright Management Systems (ECMS). Currently, the work in this area is even increasing, because there is a real and urgent need to solve the problems of multimedia content copyright control that the spreading of the Internet and the WWW has created. There are different European projects related to IPR management like IMPRIMATUR [1], INDECS [2], COPEARMS [3], FILIGRANE [4], etc. Although many technical solutions to the problems already exist, there is still a lack of an efficient and agreed business model for e-commerce of multimedia content. Several solutions are being deployed, mainly in the area of music distribution, such as 1 This work has been partly supported by the Spanish government (TEL98-0699-C02-01 and TIC2000-0317-P4-05). Soundwrap [5], DMDsecure [6], or DX3 [7], but none of them has succeeded as a model to follow. In the area of e-books, as another example more in the e-publishing world, there are different initiatives to digital rights management, such as EBX [8] and OEBF [9], and some XML based ones, such as XrML [10]. The starting point, from an IPR’s point of view, is the selection of the model in which to base IPR representation and negotiation. The IMPRIMATUR Business Model [1], the one we have selected, identifies a series of entities that may take different roles, such as Creator, Provider, Rights Holder, Distributor, IPR Data Base, or Watermarking & Fingerprint marking. Figure 1 illustrates the different entities participating in the general model for IPR handling. It must be noted that one user may take more than one different role.