A personal mobile DRM manager for smartphones

In this paper we report on our experience in building the experimental Personal Digital Rights Manager for Motorola smartphones, an industry first. Digital Rights Management allows producers or owners of digital content to control the manner in which the content is consumed. This may range from simply preventing duplication to finer access policies such as restricting who can use the content, on what devices, and for how long. In most commercial DRM systems, the average end user plays the role of content consumer, using DRM protected content made available by a service. Here we present a personal digital rights system for mobile devices where the end user has the ability to place DRM protection and controls on his or her own personal content. We designed the personal DRM system to allow users of a mobile device to transparently define controls and generate licenses on custom content and securely transfer them to other mobile devices. A user is able to define and restrict the intended audience and ensure expiration of the content as desired. Compatible devices automatically detect each other and exchange credentials. The personal DRM system on each device safely enforces the content usage rules and also handles moving licenses between devices while preventing leakage of content. We implemented a prototype of our system on Motorola E680i smartphones.