Copyright protection for modifiable digital content based on distributed environment

Abstract

Today, users themselves are becoming subjects of content creation. The fact that blog, wiki, and UCC have become very popular shows that users want to participate to create and modify digital content. Users who participate in composing content also want to have their copyrights on their modification parts. Thus, a copyright protection system for the content which can be modified by multiple users is required. However, the conventional DRM (Digital Rights Management) systems like OMA DRM are not suitable for the modifiable content because they do not support the content created and modified by different users. Therefore in this paper, we propose a new copyright protection system which allows each modifier of the content created and modified by multiple users to have one's own copyright. We propose data formats and protocols, and analyze the proposed system in terms of the correctness and security. Performance evaluation in the view of response time shows that the proposed system is 2 to 18 times shorter than other comparative schemes.