A Privacy Negotiation Algorithm for Digital Rights Management

Internet-based distribution of digital contents provides great opportunities for producers, distributors and consumers, but it may seriously threaten users' privacy. The Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems which one of the major issues, concern the protection of the ownership/copyright of digital content. However, the most recent DRM systems do not support the protection of the user's personal information. This paper examines the lack of privacy in DRM systems. We describe a privacy policy and user's privacy preferences model that protect each user's personal information from privacy violation by DRM systems. We allow DRM privacy agent to automatically negotiate between the DRM system policy and user's privacy preferences to be disclosed on behalf of the user. We propose an effective negotiation algorithm for the DRM system. Privacy rules are created following the negotiation process to control access of the user's personal information in the DRM system. The proposed privacy negotiation algorithm can be adapted appropriately to the existing DRM systems to solve the privacy problem effectively.