Privacy-Preserving Digital Rights Management

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a technology that provides content protection by enforcing the use of digital content according to granted rights. DRM can be privacy-invasive due to many reasons. The solution is not easy: there are economic and legitimate reasons for distributors and network operators to collect data about users and their activities, such as traffic modelling for infrastructure planning or statistical sampling. Furthermore, traditional PET – such as encryption, anonymity and pseudonymity– cannot solve all the privacy problems raised by DRM, even if they can help. Privacy and security considerations should be included in the design of DRM from the beginning, and they should not be considered as a property that can be added on. PET is considered as technology for privacy protection, in different fields. However, PET solutions are not the only ones to be considered useful to complement DRM systems. The contrary is also true: DRM systems are adapted as technical platforms for privacy. In short, there is a deep change in PET related to the web 2.0, and it is also true for P2DRM: transparency and other new techniques are preferred, or at least added, to anonymity, authentication and other traditional protections.