A cluster grids based platform for digital copyright protection

While the advances in networking technologies actually enable mobility and ubiquity of access to computing resources located at different administrative domains, the progress in multimedia technologies has created large amounts of digital content that can be purchased and distributed on the Internet. Within this setting, the problem of the copyright protection of digital content has become a well-known research topic. This paper presents the architecture of a web software platform able to implement the copyright protection of digital content based on digital watermarking technology. The platform is structured as a service-oriented architecture composed of a federation of coordinated web entities and service providers which play distinct roles and interact within a trusted environment. Furthermore, the proposed architecture enables service providers to use a specific middleware to exploit the computing resources they need to provide their protection services. In fact, the middleware can aggregate computing resources directly available on the Internet as well as those belonging to multidomain, non-routable networks, thus enabling service providers to build internal computing environments arranged as cluster grids.