Arbitration Server for Broadband Content Rights Management
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Solution Overview
Problem
Content providers and service providers face challenges in managing access rights to broadband content due to the disconnect between service provider billing accounts and user rights accounts, leading to difficulties in providing effective digital rights management solutions.
Innovation Solution
A system and method that involve an arbitration system to receive requests for broadband content, identify associated billing accounts, determine user access rights, and authorize access based on these rights, allowing for the identification of authorized users and facilitating purchase transactions if necessary.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Ease of operation
If service providers use billing accounts to track customers, then customer management is simplified, but mapping to user rights accounts in rights lockers becomes difficult
Solution Approach 1:
The patent introduces an arbitration server as an intermediary component that mediates between the service provider's billing account system and the content provider's rights account system. The arbitration server receives access requests, identifies the billing account, determines associated rights accounts, and coordinates with rights lockers to authorize content access. This intermediary resolves the mapping complexity by centralizing the translation logic between billing accounts and rights accounts.
2Measurement precision
If content providers maintain separate rights lockers for each user, then access control precision is improved, but the disconnect with service provider billing accounts increases
Solution Approach 1:
The arbitration server provides multi-functional capabilities by simultaneously handling billing account identification, rights account determination, and coordination with multiple rights lockers. It serves as a universal interface that works with different service provider billing systems and multiple content provider rights lockers, enabling precise access control while managing the integration complexity through a single centralized component.
3Reliability
If service providers want to protect against downstream unauthorized use, then content protection is improved, but difficulty in mapping billing accounts to rights accounts increases
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary actions by pre-establishing the mapping relationships between billing accounts and rights accounts in the arbitration server before content access requests occur. The arbitration server maintains a database or lookup mechanism that already contains the associations between service provider billing accounts and content provider rights accounts, so when an access request is made, the mapping has already been determined and verified, enabling both content protection and simplified account mapping.
Data Source
AI summary
Systems and methods for managing rights to broadband content are provided. A request for broadband content may be received by a server. The received request may include a client identifier associated with a customer device from which the request is received and a content identifier associated with the requested broadband content. Based at least in part upon the client identifier, a billing account associated with the customer device may be identified, and one or more users associated with the billing account may be identified. A set of access rights for the one or more users may be determined and, based upon an analysis of the set of access rights, a determination may be made as to whether access to the broadband content is authorized.