Abstract
With the improvement of technology, the duplication and distribution of digital contents is getting easier and easier, and the population of peer-to-peer software makes searching easier and downloading faster. This decreases the bene-fits of content providers, violates the copyright laws, and restrains the development of the digital content market. Therefore, DRM (Digital Rights Management) sys-tems are proposed to resolve these problems. Although DRM systems prevent digital contents from unauthorized access, it is insufficient to provide the functions which are associated with “personal use” and “fair use”. For example, allowing transfer of rights, allow excerpting and modification, and promoting user’s privacy. These lower the desire of consumer’s demand of purchasing the contents with DRM mechanism. In current Digital Rights Management systems, consumers cannot resell copyrighted contents arbitrarily. This violates the common use of property in the real world. In this thesis, we solve this problem which is associated with the fair use issues by providing a new function of changing access right in DRM system. Based on this new function in DRM system, we propose two new business models in Electronic Commerce. One is an AV (Audio/Visual) rental store in which custom-ers can rent audio/visual media on-line. The other one is an AV secondhand store in which customers can resell audio/visual media they purchased to others. These two new business models make our transferable DRM system reasonable and legal. In addition, we will introduce the DRM systems from the categories to the security issues and a typical architecture to acquire a basic cognition of DRM systems. Furthermore, we will address the fair use and legal use of DRM systems, and we will show the overview in the current market.