Digital Rights Management for E‐Commerce Systems

Citation

de Kock, M. (2009), "Digital Rights Management for E‐Commerce Systems", Online Information Review, Vol. 33 No. 6, pp. 1202-1203. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520911011098

As internet access increases, e‐commerce systems become more critical for the effective distribution and use of digital multimedia content. The rapid growth of multimedia content means that management and protection of this medium have become a critical issue, resulting in a need for digital rights management (DRM) systems. The aim of this book is to explore the field of DRM systems by, inter alia, reviewing relative publications that have appeared in the past ten to 15 years. The main objective of this book, however, is to concentrate on innovative technologies used for the design and implementation of advanced e‐commerce systems, which facilitate DRM and protection.

DRM for e‐commerce systems is a proposed solution for intellectual property rights (IPR) protection and management. When content (information) is created by an author, he/she holds the rights to allow browsing, editing, printing, executing and copying of that particular content. The legal rights that someone receives, whether automatically, by law or by legal procedures, and the transactional rights (which someone receives or gives up by buying or selling them), have not changed much by using new technologies, such as the Internet, mobile telephony and MP3 files. Transactions are still executed in the same way over the Internet via e‐commerce systems. What has changed is the implicit nature of rights. These are the rights defined by the medium in which the information is produced. The Internet has made the implicit rights explicit, and this provokes problems and opportunities for content providers as well as consumers.

The focus is on technologies such as data encryption and watermarking, peer‐to‐peer networks, very large databases, digital image, sound and video libraries, multimedia content‐based services, electronic licensing, digital certificates, rights expression languages, meta data standards, etc. which are used within the e‐commerce systems. Special attention is given to implemented e‐commerce systems supporting entertainment, content industry, music, cinema and culture, and to protect, manage, exploit and disseminate multimedia content and its intellectual property rights.

The publication is intended for those involved in utilising access control technologies and for preventing access, copying or the conversion of digital media by end users. It is useful for academic, research, public administration and governmental libraries.