Intellectual Property Management and Protection for Multimedia Content

Nowadays, network infrastructures are increasingly used in support to commercialization of digital multimedia content. Non-material goods (videos, music, images and any other type of multimedia information) are migrating from traditional delivery technologies to a full-electronic delivery model. Incidentally, the same features that make the management of digital content so easy are also responsible for the difficulties of selling it on-line. Digital information as it is can be easily copied an unlimited number of times and transferred to an unlimited number of people. Thus it is of crucial importance for the digital multimedia market to insure that the holders of intellectual property over the content are appropriately rewarded and that only authorized parties can access the valuable information. The goal of this work is to describe how to implement interoperable protection systems by providing a behavioral description of terminal reactions to given inputs. This approach will enable the implementation of Intellectual Property Management and Protection (IPMP) tools allowing both wide interoperability among different platforms and rapid reconfiguration in case of tampering.