SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR ASSOCIATING PHYSICAL MEDIA WITH DIGITAL FILES

Neil Day

Eric Hixon

Richard Shane

Field of the Invention

The present invention relates to establishing and maintaining ownership rights of digital content by establishing the existence of a license to a piece of physical media containing the digital content.

Background of the Invention

The sales of various types of physical media, such as, CDs and DVDs, that contain digital content represents a multi-billion dollar industry. The purchase of the physical media remains the primary delivery method for entertainment content, such as music or videos and the like. However, consumers are developing an ever-growing taste for a variety of digital playback devices where the physical media is not required or cannot be played using the digital playback device. An example of such a digital playback device is a portable digital music player, such as the iPod sold by Apple Computer. With these digital playback devices, it is necessary to transfer digital copies of the content on the physical media from the physical media to a portable device or network player which requires extraction of the content from the physical media. This extraction occupies questionable legal ground, and is highly undesirable for copyright holders because it results in un-controlled digital content that is subject to illegal copying and distribution. Because the content is digital, the illegal copies are exact copies of the original.

There are a great number of patents directed to Digital Rights Management (DRM) system and methods in which the system attempts to control the distribution of digital assets, such as music or movies, using schemes that require some rights to be granted to a user prior to using the digital asset. These DRM systems, however, do not take into account the physical media on which the digital assets are stored, nor do they attempt in any manner to correlate the digital asset with the physical media. Similarly, copy protection schemes exist that attempt to control the viewing and use of digital assets. For example, all cable and

satellite systems use some form of copy protection to prevent unauthorized users from viewing the content that is broadcast by the cable or satellite system. Similarly, encryption and/or password protection are used to try to limit the unauthorized copying/distribution of the digital content. As with the DRM systems, there schemes do not take into account the physical media on which the digital assets are stored nor do they attempt in any manner to correlate the digital asset with the physical media.

Existing "CD Ripping" services typically use an automated system for extracting digital audio from CDs. Because of legal concerns, these services typically extract the contents of each customer's disk and re-encode that content with the required parameters and codecs. Existing systems require that the service take possession of the physical disk and process all of the data on that disk. While there has been a tremendous amount of work around (DRM) and copy protection, there has not been any significant progress made in managing the rights between digital and physical formats. It is desirable to provide a system and method of validating and managing the license granted by the purchase of physical media to gain access to the digital content on the physical media as the content is shifted into the digital domain.

Summary of the Invention

The approach used in this invention is significantly different from typical "CD Ripping" services in that the invention relies on a "Media Descriptor" which is a unique "Fingerprint" derived from some aspect of the physical or logical packaging to identify the media and reference a master copy of the content which is optionally transcoded to the appropriate format for delivery to the user. Additionally, we propose to permanently mark the media as having the digital rights claimed, and track the ownership of the physical object if it re-enters the marketplace. Further, the system is effectively a repository for digital rights, which are used to provide conditional access to master files; if a new master becomes available the user can be granted access to that as a part of his existing license or as an extension of that license depending on the global access policies.

A system and method that provides managed access to digital versions of the content contained on physical media, while maintaining one-to-one relationships between the physical media and the user, and controlling access to the digital content based on that one-to-

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one relationship. In accordance with the invention, the system may create, administer and apply a Unique identifier (ID) associated with each piece of physical media, such that it acts as a verifiable proof of ownership of a license to the content contained on the physical media. For example, the proof of ownership could be used to permit a user to download a particular piece of content that is associated with a particular piece of media from a storage unit that contains a plurality of pieces of content, hi particular, the delivery system is able to verify ownership of the physical media based on the unique identifier and therefore verify the right of the user to download the particular piece of content from the storage unit. Thus, the system may be used to permit people to rapidly gain access to digital content from a piece of physical media once the ownership of the physical media is verified. For example, once the physical media had been processed and its authenticity had been established and ownership attributed to a particular user, that user, once they had verified their identity, would be able to gain immediate access to the digital versions of the physical media through a network delivery mechanism such as the Internet or a cellular network. If that user were to sell the physical media to another user, ownership of the digital rights to the physical media could be transferred by referencing the Unique ID affixed to the media, allowing the new owner to access digital versions of that physical media, hi this scenario the original owners' digital access rights would be revoked as soon as they are claimed by the new owner.

The system and method may also maintain a database of the relationships among users, physical media, licenses and digital content. These elements can be used in combination to provide conditional access to the digital content, which can be encoded using DRM to prohibit unauthorized distribution to users who have not established the existence of a license.

A method of identifying the content on the physical media is provided that ensures that the physical media has a unique identifier associated with it and that provides access to an individual who can demonstrate that he has privileges to use the content on the physical media. The method may include taking possession of a physical media that acts as a proxy for a license by virtue of being an original commercial item, establishing the authenticity and completeness of the physical media through physical inspection, if it does not already have a Unique ID affixed to it, and determining the contents of the physical media and associate the appropriate "Media ID" that uniquely describes the contents of the physical media. There are

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a variety of methods that may be employed to associate the appropriate "Media E)", depending on the format of the physical media. Several examples of these methods include, but are not limited to: optical recognition of the art on the physical media (e.g. a CD or a DVD, or any included packaging or booklets) and matching these against a database of known artwork; scanning the structure of a digital storage medium and matching that against a database of known structures; scanning a barcode on the packaging and matching the value against a database of known title identifiers; reading an RFE) tag containing a GTIN/GLN combination and matching the values against a database of known title identifiers; or reading the barcode on the inner ring of a commercial CD or DVD and matching the value against a database of known title identifiers .

hi addition, the method for identifying the content on the physical media may include establishing a Unique E) for the physical media. If the physical media already has a Unique E) associated with it, the that E) is read. If the physical media does not already have a Unique E) associated with it, a Unique E) is generated for it and affixed to the physical media using a verifiable, tamper-resistant label. The method of identifying the content on the physical media may further include creating an Instance Token that uniquely describes the Media E) and the Unique E) wherein this Instance Token becomes the "digital license" to the content contained on the physical media, and assembling one or more Instance Tokens into a "Conversion Set" and assign a "Claim E)" to that structure. This results in a bundle of Instance Tokens that represent one unit of conversion, and provides convenient access to a collection of physical media for the owner.

The method of identifying the content on the physical media may also include presenting the Claim E) to the user which can be done via a printed receipt, or through, email or some other electronic delivery method and placing the conversion set in a staging area where users can access it, either through direct physical connection or over a digital network. The user is then able to take possession of his digital files by presenting a Claim E ⁾ and (optionally) a secondary piece of identifying information. If the user fails to present the necessary identifying information, he will be blocked from accessing the digital files. In accordance with the invention, the files can then be optionally encoded with a DRM wrapper to prevent unauthorized duplication or transmission. The user also has the option of adding

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his Instance Tokens to an authorized media list, allowing him to view, manage and interact with all of his media.

Brief Description of the Drawings

Fig. 1 is a schematic diagram of the process of establishing a linkage between a piece of physical media and a piece of content in accordance with the invention to provide conditional access to the piece of content;

Fig. 2 is a plain view of an example of a device that will be attached to physical media containing the Unique ID;

Figure 3 a is a block diagram illustrating an example of a web-based computer system implementation of the system in accordance with the invention;

Figure 3b is a diagram illustrating more details of a sensing and recognition system shown in Figure 3 a;

Figure 4a is a diagram illustrating the database schema associated with the system shown in Figure 3 a; and

Figure 4b is a diagram illustrating more details of the data structure of the license database.

Detailed Description of a Preferred Embodiments

The invention is particularly applicable to providing access to content based on the ownership of a piece of physical media. Variants of this technique can be used in providing access to content on physical media that a user already owns, as well as providing immediate access to content at the time of purchase. It is in this context that the invention will be described. It will be appreciated, however, that the technique can be extended to nearly any process where access to digital content depends on the ownership of a physical object in accordance with this, the invention has greater utility such as to provide online access to a magazine article based on the ownership of a magazine. As used herein, the term physical media may include a digital data carrier such as a CD, CD-ROM, DVD, DVD-ROM, compact

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flash card, printed book or booklet. The invention however, is not limited to these particular physical media and may be used with any other type of physical media. As used herein, the term content refers to digital representations of some data, such as audio data, video data, photographic material data, text, drawings, or any combination thereof. Again, the invention is not limited to the particular examples of content set forth herein and can be used with other types of digital content.

Turning now to Fig. 1, a diagram of the process of providing access to content contained on a given piece of physical media is shown. The authenticity of the physical media is established by inspection in 001; this maybe as simple as evaluating the construction of the materials, or as involved as authenticating a watermark or some other anti- counterfeiting device.

Once the authenticity of the physical media is established, the content held on the media is identified in 002 by matching the structure of the data or the packaging against a database of known assets. As an example, scanning a well known Uniform Product Code (UPC) on the packaging of an CD and matching the value against a set of known UPCs would be sufficient to establish the identity of that CD since UPCs are guaranteed to be unique. There are a variety of other methods that may be employed to associate the appropriate "Media ID", depending on the format of the physical media. For example, the methods may include optical recognition of the art on the physical media (e.g. a CD or a DVD, or any included packaging or booklets) and matching these against a database of known artwork; scanning the structure of a digital storage medium and matching that against a database of known structures; reading an RFlD tag containing a GTIN/GLN combination and matching the values against a database of known title identifiers, or reading the barcode on the inner ring of a commercial CD or DVD and matching the value against a database of known title identifiers. This results in the creation/recovery of a "Media ID", such as the UPC read from the CD packaging above, that denotes the content of the physical media. In other words, once the piece of physical media is identified, the system is able to determine the one or more pieces of content associated with that piece of physical media since the system has information about the one or more pieces of content associated with a particular piece of physical media.

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In 003, the system determines if the physical media already has a Unique ID assigned to it by looking for an existing identifying mark or device. If the physical media does not contain such a device, in 004 one is created and placed on the object in 005 in such a way as to be difficult to remove without causing visible damage. An example of this device is shown in Fig. 2. If the physical media does have an existing Unique ID, the system attempts to resolve the rights ownership issues in 006 and only allow the process to proceed for that object if the user is the proper owner of the Unique ID associated with the piece of physical media.

Once the system has obtained both the Media ID and Unique ID, the system creates an Instance Token in 007 which represents ownership rights for the specific piece of physical media and content contained therein. This Instance Token can be used to validate ownership and grant access to the content. If the system is processing more than one piece of media (tested in step 008), the system repeats the process outlined in steps 001 - 007, building a list of Instance Tokens that will be assigned a single Claim ID in 009. This Claim ID is effectively an alias to the list of Instance Tokens that provides convenient access to all of the content on all of the piece(s) of media for a particular user that have been processed. This list of Instance Tokens may be known as Access List of the user.

Once the Claim ID has been generated, the actual content will be placed in a "pickup area" that a user can gain access to by producing the associated Claim ID, as represented in step 009. In this step, the Media IDs are translated into actual content, which can then be wrapped with the appropriate DRM before it is made available to the user for download or access.

In step 012, the user is provided with a method of entering the Claim ID and if they provide a correct Claim ID, they are given access to the content made available for them in step 010. This step also includes safeguards to prevent malicious software from discovering and claiming content through automated attacks. If the user fails to provide a valid Claim ID or the system detects an attack, a stop state is entered in step 011. Once the appropriate Claim ID has been validated, the user is given access to the content in step 013.

Step 014 provides an option for the user to add any recently claimed content to their master list of owned media. Turning now to Fig. 2, we see a schematic of the Unique ID

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device that will be affixed to the physical media to indicate that digital rights have been granted. The substrate of the device 1 is composed of a tough, flexible material imprinted with a counterfeit-proof pattern with a strong adhesive backing. Once attached to the physical media, any attempt to remove the substrate will cause easily detectable damage to the substrate itself as well as the underlying physical media. Imprinted on the device are several data elements that in concert uniquely describe the media. An element 2 identifies the issuing authority in human readable form and an element 3 is a machine readable encoding of the issuing authority, Unique ID and (optionally) other issuing authority defined data elements. An element 4 is a human readable representation of encoding specified in element 3.

The encoding of Unique ID will have specific properties that allow the authenticity of the number to be verified. It is likely that hashing and encryption technologies similar to public key cryptography and one way hashing techniques will be used to generate and validate these encodings.

Fig. 3 a is a diagram of the system 1000 used to verify ownership of the physical media and deliver the digital content to the user. In a preferred embodiment, the system is implemented as a computer system that has one or more pieces of software that implement some of the functions in the system. 1001 represents a batch of physical media being presented to the sensing and recognition system 1002. The media 1001 maybe sealed retail packages containing CDs, DVDs or other physical content and the appropriately encoded machine-readable IDs, or it may be elements of the original package deemed suitable as a proxy for the license. The system 1002 reads a set of identifiers from the media, and compares it to a database of known content. There are a variety of physical scanning methods that can be used to extract an identifier from the media, including reading the structure of an optical disk, reading the UPC from the packaging, scanning the image on a booklet or cover and so on. The recognition system 1002 queries a content storage unit 1004, that may be implemented as Media Warehouse in a preferred embodiment, for a match between the media being scanned and content in the warehouse, and provides a list of valid licenses to a License Database 1003 as a result of that lookup. The list of valid licenses may be provided to a conditional access module 1005, implemented as a piece of software in a preferred embodiment. The Conditional Access Module 1005 then takes requests for content access from a media Delivery Module 1007 and either grants or denies access to media files in the

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Media Warehouse based on the credentials supplied by the requestor, the requestor's set of valid licenses and the Access Control Lists associated with the requestor's Instance Token. Further, this module 1005 may restrict access to certain types of media and activate or deactivate features of a DRM encoding used based on the requester's profile and the device to which the content will be delivered. A DRM Processor 1006 takes the media file from the Media Warehouse 1004 and wraps it in the specified DRM envelope for the user and consuming device. The DRM Processor has the capability to manage several different DRM schemes and file delivery mechanisms. For instance, it can transform the data in a fashion appropriate for streaming delivery or file-based download delivery, using any number of DRM schemes such as Microsoft Janus or Apple Fairplay. The Media Delivery module 007 presents an interface to the user that allows him to request a set of media from the Media Warehouse and/or his license database and have it delivered to an appropriate playback device via a variety of transport layers. For example, the Media Delivery module may be asked to deliver a piece of content to a device that can only play low-bandwidth compressed files over cellular networks, or it may be asked to present full bandwidth versions of that same file for download or shipping via DVD-ROM.

Turning to Fig. 3b, we see a detailed view of the Sensing and Recognition System 1002 outlined in Fig. 3a. 1011 represents the discrete media being presented to a sensing device 1012 for extraction of specific data elements that will be processed and transformed into a Media Descriptor. The Sensing Device will have the appropriate hardware to read the intended data type(s). More than one class of sensing device may be present in the system at any given time. For instance, an implementation may have the ability to read barcodes from packaging, as well as disk structures using CD-ROM mechanisms. A Media Descriptor Generator 1013 is a suite of algorithms that takes the raw data from the Sensing Device and produces a Media Descriptor that uniquely identifies the data, and allows for deterministic comparisons between Media Descriptors. Finally, the Media Descriptor generated in 1013 is passed to a Validation and Verification Engine 1014 to match it against a known Media Descriptor from the Media Warehouse 1004 noted in Fig. 3a. The result of this process is a set of validated Media IDs that are passed to the License Database 1003 noted in Fig 3 a signifying that rights to access that content exist.

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Fig. 4a describes the data structures used to manage content in the Media Warehouse 1004 shown in Fig. 3a. The Media Warehouse contains a collection of media files and associated data and attributes. The Media Warehouse can be segmented into a cluster of instances, with each instance containing a specified set of media data. In a multi-node environment, a lookup mechanism exists to associate a given Media ID 020 with a specific instance of the Media Warehouse. Each entry in the Media Warehouse is given a unique Media ID 020 at the time of insertion. The Media DD can have a set of Meta Data 021 associated with it. This Meta Data contains a set of attributes that describe the content associated with the Media such as bibliographic data (artist, album, year of release, etc), editorial data (reviews, related media, etc.) and so forth. The Meta Data set is extensible at runtime, and can be constrained to require a minimum set of attributes and enforce dependencies between elements. Each Media ID must have one or more Media Descriptors 022, such as Media Descriptoro through Media Descriptor _n shown, associated with it. These descriptors contain sets of values that can be used to identify an element of the physical media in a compact form. The Media Descriptor will also contain a field identifying the media type it is describing (e.g., UPC, CDJTC)C, etc.) For example, the UPC associated with a disk package would constitute a Media descriptor since it uniquely describes a piece of physical media, and can be easily searched on. Similarly, the Table of Contents structure of a "Red Book" audio CD can be distilled to a set of timecode offsets and manipulated in a similar way. Finally, each Media ID will have one or more sets of Media Data 023 associated with it. These contain the actual playback data, and will contain information that defines the format the data is encoded in and the target playback environment it is intended for. As an example, a single Media ID may refer to Media Data for a lossless version of the content, a high quality version of the content packetized to be delivered over IP networks and a highly compressed version of the content encoded and packetized to be delivered over cellular networks and consumed by compute-constrained playback devices.

Fig. 4b is a description of the data structures associated with the License Database 1003 referenced in Fig 3 a. This repository contains a set of User IDs, and can be segmented by User ID ranges and clustered in a manner similar to the Media Warehouse. Each User ID 030 has a list of one or more Conversion Sets 031 , such as Conversion Seto through

Conversion Set _n shown, associated with it. Each Conversion Set contains the information for each piece of physical media that has been scanned and verified as a result of the process

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outlined in Fig. 3b, and act as a container for a related group of media. Once a Conversion Set is defined, it is typically not modified, however it is common to associate additional Conversion Sets with a single User ID over time. Each Conversion Set contains one or more Instance Tokens 032 that refers to a Media ID 020 associated with the media and a Unique ID 033 that specifies the particular physical instance of the title. Each Conversion Set also may include a Media Access Control List 035 associated with the instance token that defines the user's access rights to the Media Data associated with the Media ID referenced in the Instance Token. This allows the system to control what versions of the media are available for recall, and what encodings and transports can be used to deliver the data to the user.

While the foregoing has been with reference to a particular embodiment of the invention, it will be appreciated by those skilled in the art that changes in this embodiment may be made without departing from the principles and spirit of the invention, the scope of which is defined by the appended claims.

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