Design principles and issues of rights expression languages for digital rights management

Xin Wang

doi:10.1117/12.631621

24 June 2005 Design principles and issues of rights expression languages for digital rights management

Xin Wang

Proceedings Volume 5960, Visual Communications and Image Processing 2005; 59603C (2005) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.631621
Event: Visual Communications and Image Processing 2005, 2005, Beijing, China

Abstract

Digital rights management (DRM) provides a unified approach to specifying, interpreting, enforcing and managing digital rights throughout the entire life cycle of digital assets. Using a declarative rights expression language (REL) for specifying rights and conditions in the form of licenses, as opposite to some other approaches (such as data structures and imperative languages), has been considered and adopted as a superior technology for implementing effective, interoperable and scalable DRM systems. This paper discusses some principles and issues for designing RELs, based on the experiences of developing a family of REL's (DPRL, XrML 1.x, XrML 2.0 and MPEG REL). It starts with an overview of a family tree of the past and current REL's, and their development history, followed by an analysis of their data models and a comparison with access-control oriented models. It then presents a number of primary design principles such as syntactic and semantic un-ambiguity, system interoperability, expressiveness in supporting business models and future extensibility, and discusses a number of key design issues such as maintaining stateful information, multi-tier issuance of rights, meta rights, identification of individual and aggregate objects, late-binding of to-be-identified entities, as well as some advanced ones on revocation and delegation of rights. The paper concludes with some remarks on REL profiling and extension for specific application domains.

Citation Download Citation

Xin Wang "Design principles and issues of rights expression languages for digital rights management", Proc. SPIE 5960, Visual Communications and Image Processing 2005, 59603C (24 June 2005); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.631621

ACCESS THE FULL ARTICLE

INSTITUTIONAL
Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.

SELECT YOUR INSTITUTION

PERSONAL
Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.

PERSONAL SIGN IN

No SPIE Account? Create one

PURCHASE THIS CONTENT

SUBSCRIBE TO DIGITAL LIBRARY

50 downloads per 1-year subscription

Members: $195

Non-members: $335 ADD TO CART

25 downloads per 1 - year subscription

Members: $145

Non-members: $250 ADD TO CART

PURCHASE SINGLE ARTICLE

Includes PDF, HTML & Video, when available