Rights Expression Languages: Difference between revisions

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see [[Rights Expression Language]]
=Description=
 
By G.R. Gangadharan and Michael Weiss, from the article, An Introduction to Rights Expression Languages:
 
"The foundation of DRM technology relies
on our ability to represent the rights over digital assets. RELs
represent the rights over assets in a machine-understandable way. RELs
describe different aspects of usage control, payment, and access, for a
digital access environment.
 
According to Parrott, a REL consists of four components:
 
 
* Subjects, the actors who perform some operation or action
 
* Objects, the content against which a subject wants to perform an
operation
 
* Operations or what the subjects wants to do to the object
 
* A set of constraints or conditions under which an operation can be
performed
 
These components and their relations support a range of models, each
describing a way of applying digital rights. In general, a REL expresses
the rights of an information asset either in some form of logic or in an
XML-based language."
(http://www.osbr.ca/archive.php#A4)
 
 
=History=
 
 
By G.R. Gangadharan and Michael Weiss
 
"What follows is a brief history of RELs. A pioneering formal language
called DigitalRights describes a mathematical model of simple licenses
that consists of payment and rendering events and a formal
representation of licenses. LicenseScript is a logic-based REL.
 
Logic-based RELs express general prepositions of a permissive or
obligatory (restrictive) statement. However, these languages cannot
express a finer level of granularity of the assets, actors, or actions
involved. Logic-based RELs cannot interoperate with other types of RELs.
 
XML-based RELs support interoperable ways of expressing the rights of an
information asset. An XML-based REL allows asset producers to specify
flexible expressions. The [[Extended Rights Markup Language]] ([[XrML]]) and the
[[Open Digital Rights Language]] (ODRL) are two XML-based RELs which have
gained international recognition and are widely used in industry.
 
XrML is the basis for the REL of the MPEG-21 multimedia framework. It
focuses on the license through which a rights holder confers usage
rights to a consumer. A license can be digitally signed by the rights
holder, now also referred to as the issuer, to confirm that the holder
grants the rights contained in the license. An XrML license contains one
or multiple grants and the license issuer. A grant is the element within
the license that authorizes a subject to exercise a right on some object
under some constraints. Note that the actual terminology used by XrML is
slightly different from this.
 
ODRL is an open standard language for the
expression of terms and conditions over assets in open and trusted
environments. ODRL consists of an expression language and a data
dictionary. The expression language defines basic terms of rights
expressions and their organization using a set of abstract concepts. The
data dictionary defines the semantics of the concrete terms used to
express an instance of a rights specification.
 
ODRL is based upon an extensible model for rights expression, and
defines the following three core entities and their relationships:
 
 
* Assets, the objects being licensed
 
* Rights, the rules concerning permitted activities, the constraints
or limits to these permissions, the requirements or obligations needed
to exercise the permission, and the conditions or specifications of
exceptions that, if true, terminate the permissions and may require
re-negotiation of the rights
 
* Parties, the information regarding the service provider, consumer,
or broker
 
With these entities, ODRL can express offers (proposals from rights
holders for specific rights over their assets) and agreements (contracts
or deals between the parties with specific offers). ODRL supports the
declaration of a wide range of expressions. It can also be extended to
different types of domains. For example, we can use ODRL to specify that
a consumer of a geocoding web service can only use this service in a
non-commercial context, as well as the number of times the service can
be accessed each day. ODRL has been published by the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C), and has received wide acceptance. ODRL is supported by
several industry consortia such as the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative
(DCMI) and the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA).
 
Two applications of ODRL are an ODRL profile of the semantics of
Creative Commons (CC) licenses and the ODRL profile for services
(ODRL-S). The core semantics of CC licenses have been expressed in ODRL.
This profile supports extensions to these semantics, and defines an XML
Schema. ODRL-S is an extended version of ODRL to express clauses for
service licensing, creating a machine-understandable service license."
(http://www.osbr.ca/archive.php#A4)
 
 
[[Category:IP]]
 
[[Category:Standards]]

Latest revision as of 00:23, 2 January 2008