Isabel Gallego

Distributed Models for Brokerage on Electronic Commerce

With the development of Electronic Commerce (EC), the need of offering brokerage facilities in a distributed environment has arisen. Customers need, in many situations, systems (broker agents) that simplify them the access to the different products and services provided by suppliers. On the other hand, the existence of brokers increases the globality of EC, since customers are even more unaware of the location of their final goods providers.

An Architecture for Negotiation with Mobile Agents

New applications make networks increase their traffic daily, so a reliable and robust design must be provided to conform an architecture that could satisfy new needs. Terms as knowledge management, agents, ontologies, are key issues to achieve that architecture. Agent technology allows us to carry out interoperability and autonomy among the modules that build the architecture. Different kinds of devices are appearing, such as wireless devices. Then, a new group of applications are coming into the market, and a relevant characteristic is common in many cases: mobility. The general architecture for mobile agents applications we are describing in the paper generalises a set of applications and tools we are developing. We start the work in the context of Digital Rights Management (DRM), and a specific negotiation scenario and its implementation with mobile agents is discussed, before giving technical details of the architecture. This generic architecture includes elements coming from different disciplines, that are assembled to form a structure that fits diverse environments.

Standardisation of the management of intellectual property rights in multimedia content

Intellectual property rights (IPR) management is a key issue for the deployment of real e-commerce and multimedia content distribution on the Web. The music market is well aware of this problem, and very different approaches are being considered to cope with it. One valid approach is to develop standards allowing interoperability of solutions, and MPEG is one international standardisation initiative trying to do this. In particular, the new MPEG-21 standard is proposing that the standardisation of a digital rights expression language and rights data dictionary would help to improve system and application interoperability. The main objective of the paper is to present our approach, that goes one step further than MPEG, since we are developing a semantic approach to represent and manage IPR.

Use of the MPEG-21 rights expression language for music distribution

One of the main problems to solve when implementing systems for distribution of music in the Web is the issue of digital rights. Even when the business model problem is clarified, there are still technical problems to solve, such as the interchange of digital rights information and the control over their use. Using a rights expression language (REL) helps in solving this problem. Although there are several international initiatives to standardise a REL, we focus on the approach followed by MPEG-21, that in fact is trying to converge from existing alternatives. We present a new reference implementation of the ongoing REL standard, and we raise the idea of specifying a subset of it, i.e. a profile, to ease its implementation. By analysing what the existing Web sites for music distribution are doing, we come to the conclusion that a specific profile for music could be the starting point.

Broker-Based Secure Negotiation of Intellectual Property Rights

In the area of e-commerce of multimedia content, protection and management of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) is a key issue. Using a broker as intermediary between copyrighted material purchasers and content providers helps, apart from increasing the market perspectives, to improve the way of handling the IPR aspects. The conditions in which multimedia content is sold may vary from one case to another, especially in a B2B environment. For this reason, negotiation of copyright conditions at the purchase moment is to become more and more important.We are developing an application that represents IPR information using metadata and uses a specific protocol for negotiation purposes. All of this in a broker-based multimedia content e-commerce system. We are also experimenting with the use of agent technology to implement the negotiation protocol. The result of the negotiation is an electronic contract, that should be signed by the interested parties. Apart form specifying this data structure, we are working in the integration of an electronic signature mechanism using the XML Signature specification.

Use of Mobile Agents for IPR Management and Negotiation

The paper describes a model and an implementation of a system to negotiate and manage Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) for the electronic commerce of multimedia products such as video sequences, photos, images, music, documents, etc. This could also be used in the context of electronic publishing services like electronic production of books or multimedia CDROMs. The system considers issues from the IPR negotiation phase when a copyrighted material is sold, till the control of later payments derived by rights use. The rights use defines the capabilities that an entity has in relation to authorised operations with copyrighted products. In order to represent the IPR information, metadata are used. In particular, our implementation adapts existing models for a broker based architecture. Finally, the mobile agents are used to allow brokers to collaborate in the analysis and detection of illegal use of copyrighted material.

Use of MPEG-21 for License Protection and Key Management in DRM Systems

This work proposes a solution to the problem of the secure management and distribution of licenses and keys associated to protected resources. We have identified different use cases to illustrate the requirements of a DRM system including download, super distribution, streaming and groups or domains of users and/or devices of a user. The different mechanisms that we propose are based in MPEG-21 standard. These mechanisms enable the secure distribution of the protected content, licenses and keys, for the different scenarios analysed. Moreover, the solutions provided support joint and separate distribution of content, licenses and keys.

Use of a Rights Expression Language for Secure Music Distribution

How to deal with digital rights is one of the main problems to solve when implementing systems for music distribution on the Web. Even when the business model problem is clarified, there are still technical problems to solve, such as the interchange of digital rights information and control over their use. Using a Rights Expression Language (REL) helps solve this problem. Although there are several international initiatives to standardise a REL, we mainly focus on the approach followed by MPEG-21, which in fact is trying to converge from existing alternatives. This article presents a new reference implementation of the ongoing standard, and raises the idea of specifying a subset of the REL standard (i.e., a profile) to ease its implementation. By analysing what the existing websites for music distribution are doing, we come to the conclusion that a specific profile for music distribution could be a starting point.

Modelling Broker Agents in Electronic Commerce of Multimedia Products and Services

This paper presents the issues related to the different kinds of Broker Agents for electronic commerce. The specificity of electronic commerce of multimedia products and services is considered, proposing a classification of this kind of systems based on different characteristics and levels of complexity. The classification is also based on previous models (functional and architectural) for electronic commerce. Finally, the paper presents some implementations of two applications for electronic commerce of customised products and services in the, respectively, electronic publishing and consultancy sectors, those of the MULTIMEDIATOR and TRADE European projects. The developed systems are classified according to the described levels of complexity, and the main issues and results of the project are introduced.