Digital Rights Management in Web Services

Abstract

Technologies for Web services provide a new architecture for applications integration inside and outside the enterprise. With the flexibility provided by the Web services architecture, truly interoperable systems can be constructed. These features are favourable for the realization of business processes for Web application. In this paper, we study the feasibility and practicability of digital rights management (DRM) implementation with Web services, and further propose a watermark-based DRM implementation with Web services that can manage watermarks and deal with involved parties in a business transaction. The benefits of the proposed implementation include better coordination and interoperability among parties, a higher information privacy and security, and streamlining processes in business. These advantages overcome some major shortcomings in existing DRM implementation in e-commerce.