Mobile agents and intellectual property protection

Abstract

Technical enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights often conflicts with the ability to use the IP. This is especially true when the IP is data, which may easily be copied while it is being accessed. As electronic commerce of data becomes more widespread, traditional approaches will prove increasingly problematic. In this paper, we show that the mobile agent architecture is an ideal solution to this dilemma: by providing full access to the data but charging for the transmission of results back to the user — results-based billing — we resolve the access versus protection conflict. We define new requirements for agent frameworks to implement results-based billing: “data-aware accounting” and “data-tight sandboxing”, which, along with the common requirements such as authentication, authorization, agent self-monitoring, and efficiency, provide the mechanisms by which database owners can effectively grant users access to their intellectual property.