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Digital Rights Protection - a Great Challenge of the New Millennium Monica E

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Digital Rights Protection - a Great Challenge of the New Millennium Monica E Digital Rights Protection - a Great Challenge of the New Millennium Monica E. Borda1 Abstract – The digital era is a blessing and a curse at the same The financial losses caused by piracy became quite time. The huge benefits of digital contents leading to the important and forced producers and distributors of digital explosion of multimedia industries are also responsible for the content to impose standardization in copy protection [33]. huge piracy. The weapons against this piracy are technology and To limit the consequences of piracy the solutions are: legislation, defining digital rights management (DRM), able to technology, meaning technical solutions to prevent or catch protect and enforce the rights associated to the digital content. the illegal behaviors, standardization to impose rules on how The paper discusses the necessity of intellectual rights protection content need to be produced, distributed and consumed, generally and the concepts of DRM in today’s life. It also presents the state of art concerning encryption and defining the so called DRM systems and also protection of watermarking, the main technical solutions for DRM, and digital rights in court. The last years in addition to technical discusses the challenges and new directions for this topic. and legal measures business solutions were taken, based on the bonus concept [14]. Keywords- Intellectual property, Digital Rights Management, Encryption, Watermarking, Security II. DIGITAL RIGHTS PROTECTION CONCEPT I. INTRODUCTION Digital rights - a new concept of the digital world- are the set of rules governing the digital content from the generation Starting with this new millennium, we become “volens, to the consumption. It is at its very beginnings, huge nolens”, performers of “e-life”: e-learning, e-commerce, e- challenges facing it and requiring right solutions (technical, health, e-voting, e-banking etc. The advent of this era is due legislative and political) given by the common effort of the overwhelming to the advantages of digital information whole society. To grow healthily, each culture needs rules compared to its analog counterpart: higher quality in (codes) as Hammurabi Code, the first known legislation code transmission, processing and storage, simpler editing for the Assirobabylonian Empire (approx. 1700 BC), the facilities, lossless copying (the copy of a digital document is Roman Code for the Roman Empire so, obviously the Digital identical with the original). All these were a real blessing for Rights Code for the emerging “Digital Empire”, the largest digital multimedia technologies. “E-life” is in fact everyday one ever known, taking into account the globalization. human’s life put on electronic support. Is it good? Is it wrong? The most widely used term for this code (not yet developed Time will give the right answer. It offers a lot of benefits: as a whole) in today literature is Digital Rights Management distance is vanished; costs of processing, transportation and (DRM) defined as “the collective set of methods and consumption are highly reduced. The old face-to-face techniques used to impose rules on how content is being communications are transposed on computer networks. A produced, distributed and consumed“ [1]. Some other naïve could believe that’s time of “Heaven on Earth”: all the definitions of the term available on the Internet can be found problems caused by human’s dishonesty are disappearing on at [28],[29]. In the MPEG-21 framework [25], DRM is used this new support. Nothing more wrong: the old problems of as Intellectual Property Management and Protection (IPMP). human interaction remain and many new arise, some with All these definitions are referring to the technical aspects of dramatic consequences such as: how to trust the identity of the the problem and are in fact an extension of the Intellectual correspondent, the authenticity and confidentiality of the Rights Protection for digital technologies. information, how to protect the intellectual property. Thus the Intellectual Property (IP) refers “to creation of the mind in blessing given by digital could act as a curse. For producers the scientific, literary and artistic fields” [21]. The creations in and distributors of multimedia contents some of the above- the scientific field, including patents, trademarks, industrial mentioned advantages became generators of huge financial designs and geographic indications of source are defining the losses. Piracy (illegal copying and distribution) of digital Industrial Property, while copyright refers to literary and content stored on CD’s and DVD’s is currently a major artistic works. problem. Also the information contained in web pages, books, The history of the intellectual property starts officially with broadcasted information, are frequently copied and used 1709 Statute of Anne, known as the first copyright law given without any permission of the editor/author. in the 10-th of April 1710 [30]. In fact its beginnings are much deeper in time. In Antiquity and Middle Age, before Guttenberg, copyright protection was not known, the copying 1 Monica E. Borda is with the Communications Department, of manuscripts was made by scribes, than monks (trusty Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania, 400414, 15 C. persons -TP) and the problem of large diffusion being Daicoviciu Street, Email: [email protected] unknown because the population was illiterate, so no need for such protection. The advent of printing press in the European space and its huge development, determined a real revolution (IRTF) Research Group. Now the IRTF group is no longer (“Guttenberg revolution”) in thinking with huge consequences active without accomplishing its missions [15]. for power owners (church and nobility). Consequently History shows that necessity imposes solutions in measures for printing distribution were made: the Licensing legislation, which need to follow the technical and social Act 1662, was the first of many royal decrees to control what development of the society. was being printed. It “established a register of licensed books The history of Intellectual Rights protection illustrates that along with the requirement to deposit a copy of the book to be international laws do not exist for the protection of works licensed. Deposit was administrated by Stationers Company through the whole world. The national laws include measures who were given power to seize books suspected of containing to prevent unauthorized use of copyrighted works (see 1976 matters hostile to the church or government” [30]. Copyright Act of U.S. law [20]). The same history shows that Concerning the Industrial Property, the beginning is countries, through membership in international organizations assigned to the Paris Convention for the Protection of or conventions, try to gain wider protection for home works. It Industrial Property (1883), the first major international treaty is illegal to violate rights protected by copyright laws but (including 14 states) to protect people from one country, to these rights have also limitations, one of them being the “fair obtain protection in the others for their industrial property use” [14]. As an example: despite hacking the Content rights. The necessity of such protection “became evident Scrambled System (CSS) for DVD protection, the Norwegian when foreign exhibitors refused to attend the International teenager Jon Johansen was absolved by the Oslo court Exhibition of Inventions in Vienna in 1873 because they were meanwhile its U.S. partners selling the DeCSS (the afraid their ideas would be stolen and exploited commercially corresponding decryption device) were put to jail. in other countries” [30]. Beside governmental conventions, the private sector is Other important steps in the history of IP protection are: making associations to improve international protection of . 1886 – the Berne Convention for the protection of copyrighted materials (a modern form of guild’s law). One of Literary and Artistic Works, resulting the International them is International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) Copyright Act of 1886 [21], established in 1984 and composed by 7 trade . 1893 – the United International Bureau for Protection of associations from the most interested industries in digital Intellectual Property (BIRPI - corresponding to its French content protection: motion picture, consumer electronics and acronyms), the predecessor of today World Intellectual information technologies [14], [15]. Property Organization (WIPO) For the today’s digital environment, DRM could be . 1912 – the Copyright Act 1911, adopted in 1.07.1912, is a regarded as an extension of copyright for digital medium, but copyright law built by revising and repealing most earlier acts. in reality DRM and copyright have different regime and It extends copyright on records, perforated rolls, sound regulations. Although the used technologies (cryptography recordings and architecture works. and watermarking) are fairly mature, DRM is a new discipline, born to solve the new problems of global . 1952 – the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC) communications requiring universal multimedia access developed by UNESCO as an alternative to the Berne (UMA), which means “delivery of all types of data, for all convention for the non member states as developing countries types of users in all types of conditions” [23]. Fig.1 is giving a and Soviet Union representation of such a system. 1957 – the Copyright Act 1956, adopted in 1.06.1957, In the UMA system the digital
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