The US Patent Office issues new patents on Tuesdays. Issued patents and published applications may be early indicators of the kinds of issues being addressed by inventors and/or the companies for whom they work. Assigned to General Instrument, the first of today's patents addresses a key management protocol and authentication system for secure IP rights management. Assigned to ContentGuard, the second patent describes ways of automatically deploying security components in a content distribution system.
7,243,366, "Key management protocol and authentication system for secure internet protocol rights management architecture," assigned to General Instrument Corporation.
Abstract
A digital rights management architecture for securely delivering content to authorized consumers. The architecture includes a content provider and a consumer system for requesting content from the content provider. The content provider generates a session rights object having purchase options selected by the consumer. A KDC thereafter provides authorization data to the consumer system. Also, a caching server is provided for comparing the purchase options with the authorization data. The caching server forwards the requested content to the consumer system if the purchase options match the authorization data. Note that the caching server employs real time streaming for securely forwarding the encrypted content, and the requested content is encrypted for forwarding to the consumer system. Further, the caching server and the consumer system exchange encrypted control messages (and authenticated) for supporting transfer of the requested content. In this manner, all interfaces between components are protected by encryption and/authenticated.
7,237,125, "Method and apparatus for automatically deploying security components in a content distribution system," assigned to ContentGuard.
Abstract
A system and method for securely distributing content by automatically deploying security components. The system includes a server having content stored thereon, a client device having a standard application program for accomplishing a task related to the content, and a rights management module operatively coupled to the server and said client device and configured, upon a request to access the content, to determine if security components are coupled to the application program. The rights management module downloads and installs the security components on the client device if the security components are not coupled to the application program.
