Lack of generic digital rights management applications has stunted the growth of the media distribution industry. In this paper we point out the need for middleware services required to develop digital rights management (DRM) applications. Many functionalities are common to most DRM applications and by nature are highly distributed. Standalone DRM applications have found it difficult to implement these services in an efficient manner and have led to closed solutions with limited capabilities.

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... is paper categorizes these functions with reference to a layered DRM framework as middleware services. The characteristics and interface of each of these services is defined along with a prototype implementation of an agent-based negotiations service.