Standards for Digital Rights Languages

By Dr Renato Iannella
August 24, 2001

Digital Rights Management (DRM) poses one of the greatest challenges for content communities in this digital age. Traditional rights management has benefited from the physical world as this provided some barrier to unauthorised exploitation of content. Today we already see serious breaches of copyright with the ease that digital files can be copied and transmitted.

DRM is a large problem to solve and there are a number of ongoing efforts to develop open standards to solve some of these issues. The industry and users are demanding that standards be developed for DRM to support interoperability and not to force content owners, managers, and users into proprietary solutions. One of the significant and major DRM activities is stadardisation efforts with Rights Languages.

Both the OpenEBook Forum (OEBF) and the Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) are actively developing a new rights language. MPEG's new Multimedia Framework (aka MPEG-21) has greater reaching impact than its traditional areas of audio and video. MPEG-21 defines a 'Digital Item' as any structured digital content, including an e-book. Hence, the importance of MPEG-21 and OEBF working together closely. Appropriately, there is overlap in the members of OEBF and MPEG-21 to ensure that they work towards a single solution.

OEBF, via its Rights and Rules Working Group (which recently merged with the Electronic Book Exchange Working Group) is currently gathering requirements for its Rights language. It will then embark on analysing these requirements, and finally develop a specification for interoperable ebook vouchers, including a rights language.

MPEG-21, after a period of requirements gathering, has recently announced a Call for Proposals for a Rights Expression Language and Rights Data Dictionary. These proposals will be evaluated in December and a first Working Draft will be released then.

One of the leading contenders for MPEG and OEBF is the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL). ODRL is a vocabulary for the expression of terms and conditions over digital content including permissions, constraints, requirements, and agreements with rights holders. ODRL provides the core semantics and is positioned to be extended by different industry sectors (eg ebooks, music, audio, software) and to be a core interoperability language. The ODRL specification is currently being revised to meet all of the MPEG-21 requirements and to meet requirements from particular industry groups. The objective of ODRL is to encourage the DRM industry to standardise on a Rights Language and to enable flexible and innovative business models to support the digital marketplace.

ODRL will enable the XML codification of agreements between parties over digital content. These agreements can include the particular permissions (eg read, print, lend), constraints (eg, fixed time period, number of copies), and requirements (eg payments, registration). ODRL statements can then be exchanged with content to make the Rights explicit to the recipients or can be made available from a repository of rights information.

ODRL version 'beta 9' has now been released to the relevant standards community where it has attracted a lot of positive attention. ODRL is one of the only non-proprietary languages being proposed to the MPEG standards forum and has had significant interest from major global media companies, computer companies, telecos, and consumer equipment manufacturers.

For a review of other DRM standards efforts, given at the Open Publish 2001 Conference, see this PDF and about DRM Architectures.

Standards bodies, like MPEG and OEBF, will be important for the entire DRM sector and it is also important that communities be heard during these processes. DRM is now emerging as a formidable new challenge and it is essential for DRM systems to provide inter-operable services. A common Rights Language will be the first major step towards providing DRM solutions in safe, open, and trusted environments.


About Renato Iannella
Renato Iannella is the Chief Scientist at IPR Systems, responsible for research, development, and international standards strategies for products and services.

Renato is an active member of the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and member of the W3C Advisory Board. Renato has recently co-chaired the W3C Workshop on Digital Rights Management (DRM), and is a member of the OpenEbook Forum, MPEG standards group, the IETF DRM Working Group and the IMS Digital Repositories Working Group.

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