Enforcing Regional DRM for Multimedia Broadcasts With and Without Trusted Computing

We present the problem of enforcing a Digital Rights Management (DRM) system that needs to consider location-dependent licensing policies and operates on top of existing conditional access standards. A major application for location-dependent DRM is Pay-TV broadcasting as rightsholders require different business models in different regions. A global provider’s enduser equipment needs to validate the user location in some way in order to enforce DRM in this scenario. We will depict several solutions to the problem and compare their security qualities. The main result is that trusted computing hardware may not be the most appropriate solution given reasonable conditions.