A license management protocol for protecting user privacy and digital contents in digital rights management systems

Although the Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems have been rapidly developed to protect copyrights, they have not considered user privacy because they regard this as an unnecessary element in achieving their goals. However, the protection of user privacy becomes one of the most important issues in DRM systems as the number of people who suffer from accidents caused by the infringement of individual information dramatically increases. This paper suggests a license management protocol which is a more powerful protocol to protect individual information in DRM. To protect the exposure of information of user identification, the proposed protocol uses alias like a TID and a token instead of the identity of content users. Due to using alias, this protocol can guarantee the anonymity of content users. Also, it can prevent the leakage of individual information through encryption of usage information. In this way, it can protect the privacy of content users.