A Novel Method for Supporting Fairness in Digital License Reselling

Abstract

Current Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems permit a consumer to buy a digital license to access the corresponding content on his device. Under these current systems, however, the consumer is unable to resell the license.To allow the consumer to resell the license, all entities involved in the reselling process must be treated fairly. Fairness means that a reseller should obtain payment if and only if a buyer obtains the expected license and vice-versa. This paper presents a novel method to support fairness in reselling a digital license for DRM protected content. This method enables a reseller to fairly and securely exchange his/her license for payment from a buyer. In addition, it enables the reseller to maximize his profit and the buyer to minimize his cost in the same process.The method is designed such that the buyer can not cheat and the reseller has no incentive to do so. A practical mechanism is proposed to handle any misbehavior by the reseller. In comparison with related works, the method does not make use of any additional trusted hardware device, thus more cost-effective, while satisfying the interests of all the entities involved. The method also prevents reselling a non-resalable license and multiple reselling of the same license.