Method of protecting electronically published materials using cryptographic protocols

摘要

A method for protecting electronically published documents involves operating a computer system and network for electronic publication of documents, and includes the steps of receiving requests for documents from users having computers with display devices or printers, including with the requests unique user identification for each of the user; authenticating the requests with a copyright server; using the copyright server to direct a document server to act upon proper authentication of each request; using the document server to create uniquely encoded, compressed and encrypted documents for each authenticated request, where the documents have unique encoding corresponding to each of the users, and forwarding the documents to each authenticated request user through the network to corresponding agents of each authenticated request user, with each of the agents being selected from display agents and printer agents; and decrypting and uncompressing the documents at each of the agents and making the documents available for use only in response to receiving correct secret keys provided by the authenticated request user to the agents.