Digital Rights Management for Mobile Commerce Using Web Services

Performing digital rights management (DRM) on mobile distribution services encounters many technical problems. Major problems include privacy and trust, coordination and interoperability, security, license management, DRM operations, and payment. This paper proposes a generic DRM framework to tackle these problems. The proposed framework consists of (1) an operational mobile infrastructure; (2) Web Services (WS); and (3) a mobile DRM model. This paper emphasizes on the use of WS for DRM because research applying WS to mobile media distribution services is scarce. The framework enables basic rights insertion and enforcement (both online and offline), and media sharing. It is generic in the sense that it is independent of the generation of mobile technology. The framework has been compared with other similar DRM solutions and the results show that it outperforms them in terms of practicability and capabilities. However, there could be possible overloading and risk problems with it. This paper contributes by (1) proposing a generic DRM framework to support mobile media distribution services; and (2) exploring the use of WS for mobile commerce.