Digital Rights Management Ecosystem and its Usage Controls: A Survey

Progressive and dynamic developments in the digital content industry are significantly dependent on copyright protection. Effective usage control technologies can guarantee that end consumers are able to legally access, transfer, and share copyrighted contents and corresponding digital rights. From the technical and managerial perspectives, we give a wide survey on state-of-the-art of Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems. This paper starts with a generic DRM ecosystem that effectively supports two typical application scenarios, and the ecosystem builds multi-stakeholder trust and maximizes risk management opportunities. And also, a holistic and comprehensive investigation of usage control models, policies, and mechanism were made in detail. These include, but are not limited to, multiple comparisons of rights expression languages, security models, authorization management, rights transfer, and trustworthy utilization of secure end-user digital devices or consumer electronics. Finally, a range of open issues and challenges for DRM ecosystems are highlighted. A variety of controllable and traceable rights sharing among e-users, in combination with security risk management, will be the key for emerging social network services.