DRM Paradiso FAQs

Q: What is the status of the project?
A: We have just recently built a protype of the system to demonstrate the feasibility of the idea.

Q: Does this mean I can download your application on my iPod and get it to work?
A: Unfortunately, the answer is 'No'. iPods not only do not support wireless access between each other but they also do not allow content sharing.

Ok. You say you have built a prototype, but then you say it is far from being a product. What gives?
Prototyping a concept is just to show the feasibility of developing the system. We have built the prototype on a Neuros Developer Board. For now, this board does not have an inbuilt support for wireless. We hacked in support by plugging in a wireless dongle and porting the dongle's driver to the ARM chipset. Secondly, the board does not have support for inbuilt trusted handware that we need in our system design to support secret keys, secure storage, secure computaton etc. We used software emulation to 'add' in these requirements.

Q: Cool idea, but isn't this what Microsoft's Zune does?
As far as we can tell Microsoft's Zune allows a Zune user to send across a music file to a friend wirelessly and this friend can listen to the file "up to three times in three days". If you need to listen to it more you will need to go to the online store and buy the content. The actual selling point is still centralised. Paradiso differs markedly in that in our system we want to make every Paradiso player into a reseller. So, if you see that a friend of yours has a latest cool song and you want to buy it, you don't have to wait till you get back online, you can just buy the song from your friend directly, then and there!

Q: Hmm.. how does it defer from 'Superdistribution'?
Superdistribution is a very similar concept but the crucial difference is that in almost all superdistribution implementation, the reseller only sends the encrypted media to the buyer. The buyer then has to go online and get in touch with the key provider who will then issue the key to decrypt the media. In Paradiso, the media as well as the decryption are sent directly by the reseller to the buyer and the buyer can start listening to the music then and there! Since, this works over ad-hoc wireless network, you can do it near the water cooler, the park or even at McDonald's! Furthermore, Paradiso allows the reseller to sell resell-rights to the buyer so that the buyer can also act as a reseller. Such a concept is absent in superdistribution.