Analysis of positive incentives for protecting secrets in digital rights management

A common problem to current DRM-based services that usually offer streaming digital content and support period pricing (monthly or yearly subscription) systems is how to prevent secret (e.g., account and password) sharing beyond authorized consumers. Traditional technical solutions such as binding the secrets with specific devices can only solve this problem to some extent at the cost of user's portability. Current legal measures also encounter some difficulties such as detecting the difference in the physical identity of the user. We propose a protocol, IBSPS (Incentives-based Secrets Protection System), to encourage the consumers to keep the secrets private rather than to share them among friends. With IBSPS, a content provider can also get more revenue by attracting more honest and authorized consumers in return, even the provider has to pay an amount of money as a positive incentive for the consumers to protect the secrets. An escrow service is used in IBSPS to receive registrations and allocate the incentive. We analyze this system and show that multiple registration and collusion between users can not get a higher payment than honest one-time registration and not sharing.