A DRM Solution Based on Social Networks and Enabling the Idea of Fair Use

Fair use policy allows legal owners to share products they bought with their acquaintance; it is based on the assumptions that the owners pass an original product and they cannot use it at the same time. In the digital world, we can hardly apply those assumptions since they are based on a physical availability. Furthermore, digital content providers want to have control over the distribution of their products; thus, Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems do not assist and even forbid sharing. In this paper, we describe a DRM system that takes advantage of a social network. We will describe how a model of an existing on-line social network, which includes users’ roles and trust relationships can be applied. We will present that roles and trust metrics, maintained by the users can be coupled with sharing policies controlled by the content providers. Our solution gives flexibility to the users; it still also leaves, enough control over the content distribution to the content providers. We will show how to extend an existing Digital Rights Language (DRL) to support properties defined in social networks metadata and compare it with other approaches. Finally, we will discuss if our solution introduces the fair use policy to the digital world.