Agent-based copyright protection architecture for online electronic publishing
Xun Yi, Shigeki Kitazawa, Eiji Okamoto, Xiao Feng Wang, Kwok-Yan Lam, S. Tu · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 1999
Electronic publishing faces one major technical and economic challenge, i.e., how to prevent individuals from easily copying and illegally distributing electronic documents. Conventional cryptographic systems permit only valid key- holders access to encrypted data, but once such data is decrypted there is no way to track its reproduction or retransmission. Therefore, they provide little protection against data privacy, in which a publisher is confronted with unauthorized reproduction of information. In this paper, we explore the use of intelligent agent, digital watermark and cryptographic techniques to discourage the distribution of illegal electronic copies and propose an agent-based strategy to protect the copyright of on-line electronic publishing. In fact, it is impossible to develop an absolute secure copyright protection architecture for on-line electronic publishing which can prevent a malicious customer from spending a great deal of efforts on analyzing the software and finally obtaining the plaintext of the encrypted electronic document. Our work in this paper aims at making the value of analyzing agent and removing watermark to be much greater than that of the electronic document itself.