Content management and protection using trusted computing and MPEG-21 technologies

Content management systems are widely used for the collaborative creation, description, exchange and protection of digital content. This thesis presents several improvements in content management systems using the MPEG-21 standards and the Trusted Computing technology. The thesis can be divided in three parts: content sharing, protection mechanisms and implementation. The content sharing is improved in the area of free distributable and open content. There is already an impressive amount of free distributable content available, e.g. user-created content, but distribution, sharing and reuse of the content is hindered by incompatibilities in format and a lack of metadata. The goal of this thesis is to identify commonalities for open content and to specify a format to enhance the sharing and reuse of this type of content. The resulting format is mainly based on the MPEG-21 standards, which specify an interoperable framework for the delivery and management of digital media. The proposed format consists of a file format with integrated metadata, which is attached to each content to communicate its major information and properties. An important aspect of the metadata is the licensing of the content and the management of these licenses. The proposed concepts enable the assignment of licenses to unambiguously communicate the licensing of the content with an enhanced user experience. The resulting format enables an automatic processing and indexing of content to enhance the license management and sharing of free distributable content. The second part of the thesis deals with protection mechanisms in the content management using the Trusted Computing technology in the MPEG21 standards. The MPEG-21 standards do not define a concrete concept for security mechanisms and have no specific support for Trusted Computing. This part of the thesis presents three methods for the application of Trusted Computing in MPEG-21 to protect content. The first method shows the required extensions of the MPEG-21 standards to support Trusted Computing