METHOD OF PROTECTING ELECTRONICALLY PUBLISHED MATERIALS USING CRYPTOGRAPHIC PROTOCOLS

摘要

A method for protecting electronically publisheddocuments involves operating a computer system and networkfor electronic publication of documents, and includes thesteps of receiving requests for documents from users havingcomputers with display devices or printers, including withthe requests unique user identification for each of theuser; authenticating the requests with a copyright server;using the copyright server to direct a document server toact upon proper authentication of each request; using thedocument server to create uniquely encoded, compressed andencrypted documents for each authenticated request, wherethe documents have unique encoding corresponding to each ofthe users, and forwarding the documents to eachauthenticated request user through the network tocorresponding agents of each authenticated request user,with each of the agents being selected from display agentsand printer agents; and decrypting and uncompressing thedocuments at each of the agents and making the documentsavailable for use only in response to receiving correctsecret keys provided by the authenticated request user tothe agents.