A License Revocation Protocol Supporting Digital License Reselling in a Consumer-to-Consumer Model

Digital Rights Management (DRM) is an important technology supporting e-commerce systems and online marketing, enabling content owners and market intermediaries to securely manage and deliver digital content. In addition, P2P (peer-to-peer) networks play a pro-motive role in e-commerce. However, it facilitates illegal access to copyrighted media which may cause a violation of content owners' rights. P2P could support legal digital content transfer-reselling digital content. One peer (a reseller) could use P2P technology to send a digital content and its license to another peer (a buyer). A reseller could continue to resell it many times, causing content owners to lose revenue. This paper presents a License Revocation Protocol (LRP) to support reselling of a digital license. This LRP protocol enables a license issuer, representing a content owner, to confirm that once a reseller has resold his license, the reseller cannot continue to use the license. With LRP protocol, a reseller does not get the license payment until he revokes his resold license. The LRP protocol does not make use of any additional trusted hardware device, thus making the protocol more cost-effective.