A new architecture for digital copyright protection system based on mobile agent

Mobile agent technology and digital watermark technology compensate each other and play very important roles in the industrial applications. The integration of the mobile agent technology and watermark technology has been intensively investigated in recent years. A new architecture using this integration technology to protect copyright is proposed. This architecture includes four functional blocks: author functional block, user functional block, watermark agent center functional block and mobile agent functional block. In the first functional part, author registers his ownership watermark in copyright management sever (CMS) after embedding the ownership watermark in the work. Then CMS embeds the second watermark in the digital work which is produced by watermark agent center (WAC). This is actually a hidden agent. In the second functional part, user submits detail information about personality and desired digital work to CMS. CMS gives user the digital work and user key according to the input information. In the third functional part, WAC creates the costume-built watermark agents and makes the route strategy. In the last functional part, WAC dispatches the watermark agents to the suspicious hosts and examines its copyright.