Consumer Privacy Protection in Digital Right Management: A Survey

Abstract

Digital Right Management (DRM) is a technology used to manage the usage of the digital contents that distributed through the Internet, and helps the content owners to prevent un-authorized use of their copyrighted content. However, consumer privacy is a growing problem appeared in DRM environment. This problem emerged because of the consumers can distribute copies of the digital contents without any consideration of the owners’ copyright, which lead to moving the content owners to use DRM that allows the consumers to access the content only if they have authenticated by their identity information. Thus, the consumer privacy is violated in DRM system. This paper gives a survey about the current consumer’s privacy preserving solutions. It analyses their advantages and disadvantages and then highlights some open issues to be addressed.