Recent years have witnessed rapid developments of the information communication technology and the Next-Generation Internet.  3G and 4G wireless mobile networks have been striding to a large-scale deployment and application.  So, we have seen the potential and value for new technologies from a variety of digital networks to various interconnected digital devices, which made it possible to improve user’s digital experiences. 

The emerging versatile networks could enable a convenient connection “anytime, anywhere, anything, anyone” to the information communications network.  Unfortunately, in such environment, copyright infringement behaviors, such as illicit copying, malicious distribution, unauthorized usage, free sharing of copyright-protected digital contents, will also become a much more common phenomenon.  Multimedia contents protection & Digital Rights Management (DRM) have a tangible goal to safeguard the rights and benefits of multimedia contents owners, copyrights holders, digital services providers, and even consumers in contents value chain.  Some applications research frontiers, related to digital home network, have emerged in recent years.  These include subjects on digital home network models, architectures and mechanisms, secure digital multimedia broadcasting and controlled contents sharing.  Researchers, contents industry engineers and administrators attempt to resort to the state-of-the-art technologies and ideas to protect valuable multimedia contents and services assets against attacks and IP piracy in the emerging triple play. 

This special session aims to bring together related research works in the realm of Digital Home Networks and Ambient Intelligence, and further investigates and discusses trusted solutions and secure techniques for Digital Home Networks and DRM, as well as some open issues faced by digital contents owners/rights holders/multimedia services providers, who dedicate themselves to protect their Intellectual Property Rights and business benefits.  In addition, novel ideas and research works from end users and consumer electronics’ perspective, such as trust management and evaluations, 3D display and quality test methods, will be embraced by this special session.