Every Thursday, the US Patent and Trademark Office publishes pending patent applications. Publication has no bearing on whether a patent will eventually be issued based on the application. Still, issued patents and published applications are often indicators of what people have been thinking about and the kinds of things that individuals or companies believe may be useful to them in the future. Assigned to Intertrust, the first application is another divisional (same specification, different claims) of Ginter, et al. Claim 1 is a better indicator of subject matter than is the patent abstract, and addresses indepdent delivery of content and rules plus other conditions for authorized use. Assigned to Microsoft, the second application discloses a digital rights management scheme for an on-demand distributed streaming system.
20060069926, "Systems and methods for secure transaction management and electronic rights protection," assigned to Intertrust.
Claim 1: A system comprising: an electronic appliance, the electronic appliance being operable to store a piece of electronic content and one or more electronic rules associated with the piece of electronic content, at least one of the one or more electronic rules comprising a data object that is distinct from the piece of electronic content and having been electronically transmitted to the electronic appliance independently of the piece of electronic content, each of said one or more electronic rules providing an indication of one or more uses of the piece of electronic content and one or more conditions that must be satisfied in order to make said one or more uses of the electronic content; and tamper-resistant software operable to be executed by the electronic appliance to enforce the one or more electronic rules.
20060069798, "Digital rights management scheme for an on-demand distributed streaming system," assigned to Microsoft.
Abstract
A DRM scheme that may be optionally invoked by the owner. With the DRM protection turned on, the media is encrypted before it is distributed in a P2P network, and is decrypted prior to its use (play back). The peers may still efficiently distribute and serve without authorization from the owner. Nevertheless, when the media is used (played back), the client node must seek proper authorization from the owner. The invention further provides a hierarchical DRM scheme wherein each packet of the media is associated with a different protection level. In the hierarchical DRM scheme of the invention there is usually an order of the protection level. As a result, in one embodiment of the invention, the decryption key of a lower protection layer is the hash of the decryption key at the higher protection level. That way, a user granted access to the high protection layer may simply hold a single license of that layer, and obtain decryption keys of that layer and below. The invention further provides for a process for managing digital rights to a scalable media file wherein a different encryption/decryption key is used to encrypt each truncatable media packet with a base layer without requiring additional storage space to store the key.
