Flexible License Management Mechanism for Group Distribution

With the requirement of consumer increased, many business use models have been proposed. Group Distribution as a new kind content distribution model has attracted increasing attention. It allows consumer to purchase digital content by a group and makes flexible use of rights among members possibly. However, how to use the rights belonged to group flexibly and securely has not been solved well. In this paper, we divide license into group license and member license and propose flexible license management mechanism for Group Distribution. Group license is requested by Group Manager and managed with DB at License Server. GroupID is used as the group license´s ID. Except for Identity Certificate, we construct Group Attribute Certificate based on the structure of Attribute Certificate to identify which group member belongs to. Based on group attribute (GroupID) included in Group Attribute Certificate, member license can be decided whether to create or not.