Patent Application
20080092241
The World Wide Wed (Web) has a Digital Rights Management problem that stems from one of its great architectural strengths. It is technically extremely easy to embed pieces of content (what we will call inner content) inside other pieces of content (what we will call outer content), if the outer content's author knows the URL of the inner content. E.g., the author of an HTML page can embed an image using the SRC tag, or a video using the OBJECT and/or EMBED tags. This flexibility has helped the Web explode in content and applications, but it has also led to widespread copyright violations and confusion, e.g., bloggers embedding a copyrighted photo from CNN.com. Note that the common mechanisms for Web Access Control, passwords and cookies, do not solve this problem. This problem is not so much that unauthorized users are viewing the photo, but that they are viewing it in the wrong context, i.e., outside of CNN's site and stories.
This problem also lies at the heart of new systems for Virtual Item economies. For example, Cyworld.com charges real money for the right to display graphical representations of objects on one's Cyworld page (in particular, in the “mini-room”). Such virtual objects only have value if their scope of use is tightly controlled, as the virtual couch's value goes to zero if it is easy to copy the couch from someone else's page. (If it sounds weird that people pay real money for such virtual items, think of the more conventional collectable hobbies of baseball cards and Beanie Babies, where their physicality is much less important than their artificial scarcity.)
Cyworlds's virtual item economy works because the mini-rooms' virtual items all originate from one network server location, which integrates the media before sending to the client media browsers. That way, Cyworld may completely determine and enforce the digital rights of items in mini-rooms. (It doesn't matter that one could use image manipulation software to create an image of any item in any mini-room, because Cyworld's users are trained to respect that such images must be served by Cyworld itself in order to have value, just as “unlicensed” collectible copies have little or no value.)
However, Cyworld's DRM solution does not generalize to the cases where the media containers and the embedded media clips are provided by independent media servers from independent organizations. A Web browser retrieves the container and the clip separately over the network, and integrates the media in the browser. Thus the browser can play a critical role in managing the digital rights of the media combination.
Myspace.com has a partial solution to DRM for containers and clips retrieved separately by Web browsers. Myspace allows its members to put a music player, playing a particular tune, on their profile pages. Myspace's policy, presumably stemming from their licensing terms with the music companies, is that the music player can only appear on Myspace pages, and cannot be cut/pasted to other web pages. The Myspace site design enforces this scope of use by having profile pages issue a tamper-resistant, time-limited code that the player must send the server when initializing itself and requesting the music stream from the server. Thus if a user cut/pastes the player to another page, after the code expires the player will fail in its request to retrieve the music stream.
Myspace's player DRM scheme works because Myspace controls both the page containing the player, and the server of the copyrighted material (music). However it will not work for a third-party who wishes to enforce DRM on how its content appears on Myspace pages, without active assistance from the Myspace system. It may be impractical for such third-parties to procure the active assistance from all web content providers in their desired scope of use.
The inventors have realized there is a need for a system that encodes and enforces digital rights of media clips embedded in media containers, where the clips and containers may be provided by different media servers and organizational entities, and the digital rights data is under the control of the media clip copyright holder.
For example, the inner and outer content may be World-Wide-Web documents, the networked-content browser may be a Web browser, and the content metadata may be the Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) of the documents. For example, when an HTML document contains a URL for an embedded video, a Web browser can check to see whether that combination is permitted before rendering. The relation that determines whether the specific combination of URLs is permitted can be encoded inside either document, or in the implementation of a network service that takes two URLs as input and outputs a permission value. This functionality can be implemented either as part of the Web browser code itself, or inside browser plug-ins specific to certain media types
Other networked-content browsers can employ such a method. Video game software, and the related category of Virtual Worlds, increasingly accesses networked content and thereby acts in many ways like a browser. In such cases, for example, the outer content may be a 3D scene (landscape, room, etc.) and the inner content may be the objects (animals, buildings, etc.) placed therein. As another example, the outer content may be a user's avatar and the inner content an article of clothing or weapon. Even if the scenes, objects, avatars, and clothing are provided by disparate authors over independent network services, their digital rights may be managed.
b) illustrates another form of content embedding, where the outer content is a 3D scene. The figure shows 3D objects as inner content, but also any 2D media can be inner content in 3D outer content, mapped onto any surface in the scene. Indeed it is a common practice in 3D modeling and rendering to map 2D raster images onto 3D surfaces, called texturing. It is also not uncommon to map videos, HTML, and Flash as textures.
The cube in
An aspect of such an embedding is that the outer and inner content may be authored independently, stored on separate files, and in a networked system, stored on separate servers. That puts the browser (or more generally, the content renderer) in the position of combining the two per instructions in the outer content, but potentially against the wishes of the owners of the inner content. This is where the browser may take an active role in digital rights management.
a) shows an architecture where the inner content's server also stores and serves data regarding the digital rights of embedding the inner content in various outer content. (The inner content and digital rights data need not be on the same server hardware or operating system processes, but it does assume high levels of trust and communication between subsystems, so they are usually part of the same administrative entity.) This makes sense because it will typically be the owners of the inner content that have an interest in preventing digital rights abuse by outer content.
b) shows an alternate architecture where the digital rights data is stored and served by a trusted third-party. That is, the third-party would be trusted by the owners of the inner content to represent the inner content regarding the digital rights of embedding in outer content.
Such encoded digital rights for a particular piece of inner content is a variation of access control. Existing access control information representation techniques may be used such as white-lists (a list of those allowed) and black-lists (a list of those denied) ranging over outer content metadata patterns.
b) shows inner content indirectly identifying the digital rights data by encoding a reference to a digital rights data server provided by the inner content's owner, agent, or trusted third-party. In a Web system, the reference to the digital rights data server is by URL.
Both parts of
Another aspect of the
Upon being considered tamper-resistant,
When contacting an implicit digital rights service, or a well-known (network location is known a priori to the browser) digital rights service in
A further aspect is an alternative to the mere refusal message. The browser can cause display of a message conveying how to obtain digital rights for display of the inner content. For example, this message may describe payment terms and a link to a payment user interface for purchasing such digital rights. This may be especially useful when the browser's user is the owner of the outer content, as in a social network where a user is browsing his/her own personal page and attempting to embed some inner content. Another example of an alternative message is a user interface to send a message to the owner of the outer content, asking them to procure the digital rights to display the inner content.
