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 assump-
tions since they are based on a physical availability. Fur-
thermore, 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 ad-
vantage 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 ex-
isting 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.
(C) Copyright 2003-2006 by Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) and WETI & Main Library Gdansk University of Technology, Poland and Sebastian Ryszard Kruk.
All rights reserved