Information Online 2001 exhibition and conference

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Digital issues III

Online Rights Management Trading

Renato Iannella
IPR Systems Pty Ltd

The Internet has provided new opportunities for suppliers of information to reach larger markets and offer improved services. One of the areas lacking on the Internet are technologies for managing the trade of digital assets. The trading involves adequately managing the ownership of the copyright, controlled distribution, rights holder payments, and reuse of digital assets. The implications of this technology has far-reaching effects for any community that needs to manage and provide access to large repositories of digital works. This paper will review these technologies with respect to an online trading system developed by IPR Systems. The outcomes will highlight the issues that are currently being resolved and the ways forward for newer technologies.

Libraries World-Wide are finding advantages in forming consortia for the purpose of purchasing access to online information resources. There is growing evidence that they lead to a 'win-win' situation for libraries, publishers and library patrons alike. There are a growing number of successful examples of 'citizen access' consortia, including some Australian ones, which provide access to online information resources through public, state and national libraries. This paper examines the current situation in Australia and a proposal to work towards a consortium involving all public, State and National libraries and a national site license.

Introduction

The Internet has provided new opportunities for suppliers of information to reach larger markets and offer improved services. One of the areas lacking on the Internet are technologies for managing the trade of digital assets. The trading involves adequately managing the ownership of the copyright, controlled distribution, rights holder payments, and reuse of digital assets.

The implications of this technology has far-reaching effects for any community that needs to manage and provide access to large repositories of digital works. This paper will review these technologies with respect to an online trading system developed by IPR Systems. The outcomes will highlight the issues that are currently being resolved and the ways forward for newer technologies.

The web architecture

The web has established itself as probably the premier mechanism for information exchange of any digital form. Many non-web systems are also moving over and using web technologies. The biggest area is seen in the effort behind XML as the encoding syntax of choice.

The web has been built up over the past decade from some simple yet effective ideas. These include:

identification of resources with URLs
a data transfer protocol (HTTP), and
a simple markup language (HTML).

Since then, the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has established itself as the body responsible for new technologies to bring the web to its full potential.

Recently, the W3C has developed specifications in a number of related metadata areas. On the semantics side, these include:

the Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS) for rating of web resources,
the Privacy Practices and Preferences Project (P3P) for specifying user and site privacy expectations, and
Composite Capabilities/Preference Profiles (CC/PP) for specifying how clients indicate their capabilities and requirements to servers.

The interesting aspect of these specifications is that all three provide similar metadata services and operations. That is, how to associate some metadata about a resource, locate and transfer the metadata. However, all three do this using different solutions.

On the technical side, some of the metadata specifications include:

the Resource Description Framework (RDF) syntax and schema language, and
the XML Schema language.

The RDF attempts to provide the necessary tools to make formal assertions about resources based on logical expressions and includes its own schema language. The XML schema specification attempts to provide ways to describe the elements of XML documents and their datatypes, structures and relationships.

The interesting aspect of these two specifications is that there is no relationship between the RDF Schema and XML Schema languages. Ideally, RDF Schemas should be built on top of XML schemas.

Curiously, the director of W3C (Tim Berners-Lee) presented the 'web architecture' shown in Figure in which RDF neatly sits upon XML Schemas (at XML World, Boston, 6 September 2000).

Figure 1. W3C framework

The need for a common and consistent architecture is important for new services to emerge on the web. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a good example as it will require trusted services that need to be pervasive throughout the web.

Digital rights management

Digital Rights Management (DRM) involves the description, layering, analysis, valuation, trading and monitoring of the rights over an enterpriseís assets; both in physical and digital form; and of tangible and intangible value. DRM covers the digital management of rights - be they rights in a physical manifestation of a work (eg a book), or be they rights in a digital manifestation of a work (eg an ebook). Current methods of managing, trading and protecting such assets are inefficient, proprietary, or else often require the information to be wrapped or embedded in a physical format [HIGGS].

A key feature of managing online rights will be the substantial increase in re-use of digital material on the web as well as the increased efficiency for physical material. The pervasive Internet is changing the nature of distribution of digital media from a passive one way flow (from publisher to the end user) to a much more interactive cycle where creations are re-used, combined and extended ad infinitum. At all stages, the rights need to be managed and honoured with trusted services.

Current rights management technologies include languages for describing the terms and conditions, tracking asset usages by enforcing controlled environments or encoded asset manifestations, and closed architectures for the overall management of rights.

Open DRM framework

Traditional DRM (even though it is still a new discipline) has predominately taken a closed approach to solving problems. That is, the DRM has focused on the content protection issues more than the rights management issues. Hence, we see a movement towards Open Digital Rights Management (ODRM) with clear principles focused on interoperability across multiple sectors and support for fair-use doctrines.

The ODRM framework consists of technical, business, social, and legal streams as shown in figure 2.

Figure 2. ODRM framework

The ODRM Technical stream consists of an Architecture (ODRA), trading protocol (ODRT) and protection (ODRP) mechanisms with the language (ODRL) clearly focused on solving a common and extendable way of expressing rights assertions within this architecture.

The ODRM architecture exists in other forms that are specific to other communities needs, such as privacy metadata (P3P). Hence, ODRA can be achieved by abstracting and reusing such architectures to enable trusted metadata expressions about digital assets. This relates to the web Architecture as specific metadata (such as P3P and CC/PP) need to accommodate DRM metadata. The best way to do this is to design the web Architecture with this ability - any metadata can be expressed, understood, and exchanged.

It is envisaged that a rights language (ODRL) will 'plug into' an open framework that enables peer-to-peer interoperability for DRM services. See [Erickson] for an overview of this area. However, ODRL can also be used as an mechanism to express rights statements on its own and to plug into existing DRM architectures, for example, the Electronic Book Exchange [EBX] framework.

Metadata Model

Modelling for DRM is extremely important. Apart from the usual concerns, with DRM it is paramount that the model support any and all rights holders over digital assets. Hence, the metadata behind DRM needs to be effectively modelled and reflect industry practice. Such metadata covers the description of parties, the content, and the rights. As can be seen in figure 3 the metadata model is built on these three core entities.

Figure 3. The metadata model

ODRL language

The ODRL complements existing analogue rights management standards by providing digital equivalents, and supports an expandible range of new services that can be afforded by the digital nature of the assets in the web environment. In the physical environment, ODRL can be used to enable machine-based processing for rights management.

The ODRL is a standard vocabulary for the expression of terms and conditions over assets. ODRL covers a core set of semantics for these purposes including the rights holders and the expression of permissible usages for asset manifestations. Rights can be specified for a specific asset manifestation (format) or could be applied to a range of manifestations of the asset.

ODRL does not enforce or mandate any policies for DRM, but provides the mechanisms to express such policies. Communities or organisations, that establish such policies based on ODRL, do so based on their specific business or public access requirements.

ODRL depends on the use of unique identification of assets. This is a very difficult problem to address and to have agreement across many sectors and is why identification mechanisms and policies of the assets is outside the scope of ODRL. Sector-specific versions of ODRL may address the need infer information about the asset manifestation from its unique identifier.

The ODRL model is based on an analysis and survey of sector specific requirements (models and semantics), and as such, aims to be compatible with a broad community base. ODRL aims to meet the common requirements for many sectors and has been influenced by the ongoing work and specifications/models of the following groups:

<indecs> [INDECS]
Electronic Book Exchange [EBX]
IFLA
DOI Foundation
ONIX
MPEG
IMS
Propagate Project [PROPAGATE]

ODRL proposes to be compatible with the above groups by defining an independent and extensible set of semantics. ODRL does not depend on any media types as it is aimed for cross-sector interoperability.

Foundation model

ODRL is based on a simple, yet extensible, model for rights management which involves the clear separation of parties, assets, and rights (usage, constraint, and rights holder) descriptions. This is shown in figure 4.

Figure 4. ODRL foundation model

The rights entity consists of usage, constraint, and rights holder which together enable the expression of digital rights over the identified asset and their rights holders (parties). The parties role with respect to their entitlements can also be expressed.

The description of the party and asset entities are outside the scope of ODRL. What is in scope is that these entities must be referenced by using unique identification mechanisms (such as [URI], [DOI], [ISBN] etc).

The asset entity (sometimes referred to as a work, content, creation, or intellectual property), is viewed as a whole entity. If the rights are assigned at the Asset's subpart level, then such parts would require to also be uniquely identifiable. The Rights entity also consists of an administration entity that captures the responsible party and validity of the rights expression.

Complete details on ODRL can be found at [ODRL].

ODRL Example

An example of ODRL is given in the following use case.

Corky Rossi (an author) and Addison Rossi (an illustrator) publish their e-book via 'EBooksRUS Publishers'. They wish to allow consumers to purchase the ebook which is restricted to a single CPU only and they are allowed to print a maximum of 2 copies. They will also allow the first 5 pages (subunits) of the ebook to be viewed online for free. The revenue split is $AUD 10.00 to the author, $AUD 2.00 to the illustrator and $AUD 8.00 to the publisher.

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<rights xmlns="http://odrl.net/0.8/"

xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">

<asset ID='001'>

<uid idscheme='DOI'>doi://10.9999/EB/rossi-0001</uid>

<name> How to Wash Cats </name>

</asset>

<rightsholder ID='003'>

<party>

<uid idscheme='DOI'>doi://10.9999/EP/crossi-001</uid>

<role>Author</role>

<fixed amount='10.00' currency='AUD'/>

</party>

<party>

<uid idscheme='DOI'>doi://10.9999/EP/arossi-001</uid>

<role>Illustrator</role>

<fixed amount='2.00' currency='AUD'/>

</party>

<party>

<uid idscheme='DOI'>doi://10.9999/EP/ebooksrus-01</uid>

<role>Publisher</role>

<fixed amount='8.00' currency='AUD'/>

</party>

</rightsholder>

<usage ID='002'>

<asset xlink:href='#001'/>

<rightsholder xlink:href='#003'/>

<display>

<remark> Constrain to a particular CPU only </remark>

<constraint>

<cpu/>

</constraint>

</display>

<print>

<remark> Can only Print 2 Copies </remark>

<constraint>

<count start='0' end='2'/>

</constraint>

</print>

</usage>

</rights>

OzAuthors

Ozauthors is a unique and visionary project to transform Australia's literary heritage to digital form, to change Australia from a consumer/purchaser of overseas content and cultural content to a producer and wealth generator of cultural content. OzAuthors showcases Australian authors and shows that our creative industries are as inspiring as our sporting performances.

OzAuthors enables authors and rights holders to manage and track intellectual property in the on-line world. Works are placed there in a safe digital environment. The creator or rights owner determines the kinds of usage and the levels of payment associated with any given work. Works can be sold in part or in full, depending on what the owner of the digital content has specified. Issues of access, equity and fair dealing are integral to the development of this project, as are the key relationships with readers, libraries, the education sector at all levels and publishers.

OzAuthors is built with the purpose of exploring the development of new DRM standards, such as ODRL, and to enable new web standards to benefit all consumers and producers.

An update on the pilot OzAuthors project can be found at [OZA] and a sample screen shown in figure 5.

Figure 5: OzAuthors screen

Conclusion

Digital rights management on the web is now emerging as a formidable new challenge. The industry is now demanding that standards be developed to allow interoperability and not to force the content manager to encode their works in proprietary formats. It is important that all communities be heard during this process.