Sharing Digital Rights with Domain Licensing

Sharing of multimedia content is a common practice that, combined with appropriate business models, need not be detrimental to the interests of content providers. Existing digital rights management systems, however, support only relatively limited sharing of content between multimedia terminals, resulting in inconvenience and frustration for end-users of rights-managed content. In this paper, we propose to combine the notion of an "authorised domain" with an "environment role" to permit end-users to share access to multimedia content within the constraints expressed in a domain licence. We describe how a variety of different business models can be supported using domain licences, and propose a preliminary domain expression language in which licences can be written. Finally, we demonstrate the practicality of our model by outlining how it could be implemented using the Open Mobile Alliance's specification for authorised domains together with a ubiquitous computing network. Our proposal provides greater expressive power than the base OMA DRM framework without requiring users to upgrade their devices.