Hardware adaptive copyright protection mechanism for digital contents

Binding digital license to a unique identification of hardware configuration of the rendering device is the most popular strategy adopted in current digital rights management. But the main drawback of this scheme is that the protected content cannot be rendered any more once the user replaces any part of the hardware. By encrypting the digital content, splitting the decryption key into multiple pieces and binding them each to different hardware components of the machine, the authors propose a hardware adaptive copyright protection mechanism for digital contents. With this scheme, a buyer can change the hardware configuration of his machine within a determinate range without influencing the use of the bought digital content. Meanwhile, copyright of the content is properly protected.EI05800-8084