A secure e-course copyright protection infrastructure
Joe Yau Cho-ki · 2006
The landscape of education has been greatly reshaped with the advent of the digital era. Now, not only is e-Education feasible and viable, it has a tremendous growth especially in the area of adult learning and corporate training. Started off as a support to facilitate instructor-to-learner and learner-to-learner communications, and the distribution of learning materials, e-Education has evolved into a platform for delivery online courses. Online courses, or e-Courses, is the trend. Its popularity is best demonstrated by the high variety of e-Courses available, and the massive volume of course material that has been produced. Though e-Education and e-Courses have been the focus of much attention, little research has been done to protect the valuable intellectual property of the course material. On the other hand, copyright protection is a branch of research under the big topic of computer security, and has been studied for quite a while. It has been applied to different types of material, including audio, video, music, movies and textual information. And yet, very few research has been done for protecting the copyright of course material of e-Education. The main theme of this thesis is to study the copyright protection problem for the delivery of online course. An infrastructure, called the e-Course eXchange (eCX) has been developed to protect the copyright of e-Course material, right from the development phase of an e-Course to the point where the e-Course is delivered to the students for their studies. One important feature of eCX is that it allows the students to download a copy of the e-Course material onto their own computer. This feature enables students to study e-Courses anytime and anywhere, yet eCX can still securely protect the c-Course material. Students are stopped from sharing the material with others, and pirating the material is therefore impossible. This feature, seldom found in other e-Education systems, makes eCX an unique and challenging project. This thesis gives a detailed description of eCX, and provides an in-depth analysis on the security of eCX. The result has been encouraging, and a few important design principles for copyright protection systems have been identified. These principles could also be applied to closely related systems, such as content protection systems and digital rights management systems. Not only is eCX a research work for studying the copyright protection problem, but it has also been developed into a live system with a large user base.