Contents

Although various publications confirm the need for a generic DRM software architecture, we observe that current state-of-theart DRM architectures are not sufficiently detailed to enable the creation and management of DRM systems and content distribution applications. This is a considerable problem that implies a crucial challenge for the evolution of DRM, given the impact of a software architecture on the functional and non-functional qualities of the implementation. This report presents (1) a critical analysis of a previously presented DRM architecture, (2) a refined DRM architecture that handles the main issues that were identified in this analysis, (3) a detailed description of the proposed architecture from four perspectives: content handling, consumer tracking, licensing, and content securing, (4) detailed interfaces of all identified components, (5) scenarios to illustrate usage of the architecture, and (6) an evaluation of the proposed architecture based on nine major quality attributes. The architecture is compared with related work in tw