Digital rights management dongle

• US 8,296,240 B2
• Filed: 03/22/2007
• Issued: 10/23/2012
• Est. Priority Date: 03/22/2007
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: Sony Corporation (Sony Group Corp.), Sony Electronics Inc. (Sony Group Corp.)
• Original Assignee: Sony Corporation (Sony Group Corp.), Sony Electronics Inc. (Sony Group Corp.)
• Inventors: Read, Christopher Jensen
• Primary Examiner(s): Hewitt, II, Calvin L
• Assistant Examiner(s): Qayyum, Zeshan
• Application Number:
  US11/690,086
• Publication Number:
  US 20080235140A1
• Time in Patent Office: 2,042 Days
• Field of Search: 705 57- 59
• US Class Current: 705/59
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 21/10 Protecting distributed programs or content, e.g. vending or licensing of copyrighted material protection in video systems or pay television H04N7/16 ; Digital rights management [DRM]

Abstract

A dongle for digital rights management protection, in accordance with one embodiment of the present technology, includes a digital right management engine and an encryption/decryption engine. The digital rights management engine is adapted to port digital rights management rules of a source of content to digital rights management rules enforced by the digital rights management engine. The encryption/decryption engine is adapted to re-encrypting the source of content into a managed copy of the content, wherein the managed copy of the content is locked to the dongle.

Claims

1. A method of digital rights management comprising:

receiving source encrypted content at a computing device, wherein the computing device comprises a rendering module;

transferring the source encrypted content from the computing device to a dongle;

translating, by the dongle, a set of digital rights management rules associated with the source encrypted content to a set of digital rights management rules associated with the dongle;

generating, by the dongle, a managed copy of the source encrypted content by decrypting the source encrypted content, encrypting the decrypted source encrypted content using a dongle key and storing the managed copy in the memory of the dongle or in a storage media of the computing device;

decrypting the managed copy by the dongle and creating a rendering copy by re-encrypting the decrypted managed copy using a public key of the rendering module; and

transmitting by the dongle the rendering copy to the rendering module.

2. The method according to claim 1, wherein the source encrypted content is locked to a source of the content.

3. The method according to claim 1, wherein the source encrypted content is transferred from the computing device to the dongle across a secure communication channel negotiated between the dongle and an input device that the source content was received on by the computing device.

4. The method according to claim 1, wherein the managed copy of content is transferred from the dongle to the computing device across a secure communication channel negotiated between the dongle and a controller of the computing device-readable media that the managed copy is stored on.

5. The method according to claim 1, wherein the rendering copy of the content is transferred from the dongle to the rendering module across a secure communication channel negotiated between the dongle and the rendering module.

6. The method according to claim 1, wherein the computing device comprises a computer.

7. The method according to claim 1, wherein the computing device comprises a game console.

8. The method according to claim 1, wherein the computing device comprises a digital video recorder.

9. The method according to claim 1, wherein the computing device comprises a home entertainment system.

10. The method according to claim 1, wherein re-encrypting the managed copy of content into the rendering copy of content includes:

decrypting, by the dongle, the managed copy of the content, using the dongle key that is not accessible outside the dongle, into a clear copy of content not accessible from outside of the dongle; and

encrypting, by the dongle, the clear copy of content, using the public key of the rendering module, into the rendering copy of content.

11. The method according to claim 1, wherein the managed copy of the content locked to the dongle further includes translating the set of digital rights management rules associated with the source encrypted content to the set of digital rights management rules associated with the dongle.