New patents are issued by the USPTO on Tuesdays. Both of today's Spotlight Patents concern aspects of digital rights management. Assigned to Pulselocker, the first patent addresses techniques for limiting access to data by process or computer function with stateless encryption. Assigned to Konica Minolta, the second patent addresses techniques for digital rights management for emails and attachments.
9,727,708, "Method and apparatus for limiting access to data by process or computer function with stateless encryption," assigned to Pulselocker, Inc.
Abstract
Systems and methods related to DRM content usage mechanisms for both online and offline usage of content are disclosed, including systems providing secure access to data regardless of network state or connectivity state to the networked access control mechanism. An access control mechanism having a secondary offline access control mechanism is presented, further including multiple implementations for data encapsulation, as well as providing a method for writes to files and to the filesystem itself by externally created applications with no API or modification to their operation.
9,716,693, "Digital rights management for emails and attachments," assigned to Konica Minolta Laboratory U.S.A., Inc.
Abstract
A digital rights management (DRM) method for protecting emails can apply different protection policies to different components of an email such as the message body and the attached digital files. While an email application of the client encrypts the entire email document including both the message and the attachments, a plugin module on the client obtains user input regarding the DRM policies to be applied to individual attachments and then transmits the encrypted email along with the information about the DRM policies for the individual attachments to a digital rights management server. The server first decrypts the entire email document, then applies the user-specified DRM policies to the attachments individually. The server re-composes an email and attaches the individually protected attachments, and transmits the email to the exchange server.
