Method of Protecting Electronically Published Materials Using Cryptographic Protocols

摘要

The present invention is a method of protecting electronically published documents. It involves operating a computer system and network (9) for electronic publication of documents, including the steps of: a) receiving requests for documents from a plurality of users (117) having computers with display devices (121) or printers (123), including with the requests unique user identification for each of the plurality of users; b) authenticating the requests from the plurality of users with a copyright server (7); c) using the copyright server to direct a document server (3) to act upon proper authentication of each request; d) in response to direction from the copyright server, using a document server (7) to create uniquely encoded, compressed and encrypted documents for each authenticated request, the documents having unique encoding corresponding to each of the plurality of users, and forwarding the documents to each authenticated request user through the network (9) to corresponding agents of each authenticated request user, each of the agents being selected from display agents (111) and printer agents (113); and, e) 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. These agents are either pre-installed as software into each of the plurality of users' computers, pre-installed as hardware or firmware into user hardware selected from display devices and printers, or are software programs transmitted at the time of use.