FORM : A Federated Rights Expression Model for Open DRM Frameworks

Abstract

Digital Rights Management frameworks (DRM) aim at protecting and controlling information contents widely distributed on client devices. Using a license, the content provider can decide which rights can be rendered and who are the authorized end-users (as identity holders) allowed to exercise those rights. Most of the time, it is hard to add new feature to the client application, it is even impossible when the new feature is not considered trustworthy by the corporation distributing the rendering application. In a same way, the rendering application identifies the end-user with a dedicated identity and it is impossible to take into account an identity provided by an external corporation. In this paper, we aim at providing a federated approach called FORM where a content provider can decide to trust external rendering rights and external identities. We even go further introducing identity providers, actions providers as we consider content providers. Thus, all kind of providers can define license specifying what can be done with the object they provide. FORM defines a new license model and a new license interpretation mechanism taking into account all licenses issued by a federation of object providers.