Approaching the rights management interoperability problem using intelligent brokerage mechanisms

The digital content industry is facing significant challenges. One of the most significant challenges is the Intellectual Property protection. This challenge has been addressed technologically by using Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems that on a first stage ensured the appropriate management over digital content.However, rights management systems, as they are today, are completely non-interoperable, creating immense problems to the digital content final users. Perhaps one of the biggest problems is the fact that the same digital content that is governed by different rights management systems cannot be exchanged between different rights governance systems.This paper presents some of the work that has been performed under the framework of the VISNET-II Network of Excellence (NoE) to address some of the rights management systems interoperability problems. The approach followed by the proposed work consists on the usage of service description and service-oriented architectures as a mean to create a common and interoperable environment between the different systems.