Extending an MPEG-21 viewer to manage access rights

The Internet has opened many opportunities for the distribution of information, both free and copyrighted. A music album is quickly transferred with high quality between Internet users, peer-to-peer networks enable simple trading and redistribution of copyrighted music, video and programs. Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems are designed to enable legal trading of copyrighted information, prevent unauthorised distribution, modification and usage of copyrighted digital information. MPEG-21 is a new standard for multimedia on the Internet. It is described as being the big picture in describing multimedia content. It allows for composition of digital items from different resources such as pictures, sound, etc. This standard is still under development by the Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG). MPEG-21 Intellectual Property Management and Protection (IPMP) is a framework for enabling DRM in MPEG-21. IPMP enables a MPEG-21 terminal to communicate through messaging with various IPMP-tools to protect MPEG-21 content. A Rights Expression Language is a language capable of describing users rights to some digital information. One part of MPEG-21 is the Rights Expression Language, which will be based on The eXtensible rights Markup Language. The SMICL viewer is a viewer for MPEG-21; it is under development and is supposed to be a research platform for security related research. In this thesis we review some of the current systems for DRM and present some Rights Expression Languages. Further we describe MPEG-21 and the SMICL viewer and its architecture. We discuss refinements of the IPMP messaging for the SMICLV viewer and the required behaviour of a rights enforcing IPMP tool. Finally we provide an implementation of a rights enforcing IPMP tool for the SMICL viewer, and propose future extensions for the SMICL viewer and the rights enforcing tool.