Reselling Digital Content

Abstract

Digital content, protected by specific terms of use, is currently delivered to customers via a few selected content providers. Allowing arbitrary entities, not just trusted content providers, to resell legitimately purchased, protected digital content to another entity, adds additional challenges to a DRM environment. In this paper, we formally model the problem of reselling digital content, and we provide a secure construction based on one-time (proxy) signatures. Our construction allows an arbitrary seller to resell its digital content to any buyer. We ensure that the identity of the buyer is only known to the seller. The buyer can verify that the purchased content is genuine. After the transaction is completed only the legitimate current owner can use the digital content. Any illegal use can be identified by a trusted authority.

A novel approach to allow multiple resales of DRM-protected contents

“…This solution uses a smart card technology to perform the DRM related process. Finally, the solution presented in [15] does not require any use of the trusted hardware nor smart-card technologies. Refer to [20], for more details of these approaches.…”

“…According to the literature, there are a number of solutions [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15] proposed to address the license reselling problem. These solutions fall into three approaches: full-trusted hardware based, partial-trusted hardware based, and non-trusted hardware based.…”

“…Reselling something that a consumer rightfully owns (including digital licenses) is a legitimate right under the first sale doctrine [9]. To support this legitimate right, a number of license reselling proposals have been presented in the literature [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16] in recent years. However, none of these proposals have addressed the multi-reselling of a license.…”