Abstract
Considering Pervasive Computing environments and a global digital market having complex, often contradictory national and international regulations, it is impossible for rights holders to define universal Digital Rights Management (DRM) policies governing the usage of their content while still considering user rights. Exceptions are unanticipated usage situations where some rights should be waived while still maintaining a given level of persistent protection and governed usage. The industry and traditional DRM approaches haven’t considered such alternatives. To tackle this issue and demonstrate the feasibility of such an approach, this paper reports and discusses a proof of concept prototype implementation based on a model supporting exception management in DRM environments using credentials.