Rights Expression Languages and Vocabularies: Which Does What?

by Julia Goodwin

 

For many years, segments of the media world have developed and continue to develop Rights Expression Languages (RELs) so that media rights information can be readable by computers and displayed as text readable by humans.  This allows licensors and licensees to share contract information about content more easily.  Some of these languages are used for specific types of media such as images or news while others cover the media gamut.  These “languages” define a common structure or containers that can store specific rights metadata.  That rights metadata or vocabulary may be whatever a licensor is using internally or it may be a shared vocabulary standard that works with a particular REL.

This blog provides an overview of the major REL and rights vocabulary initiatives and any media specialization.  Each REL’s website is cited for reference.  If your company is considering implementing an REL, I hope the information provided here helps you identify which RELs to research more deeply.

The Candidates:

ccREL:  (The Creative Commons Rights Expression Language) is an open source language submitted by the W3C to the Creative Commons for the management of rights licenses which are expressed as HTML documents informing the Internet community of rights holders for an IP, including media.  It does not have a standard rights vocabulary developed yet.  

Dublin Core Rights Element:  The Dublin Core is not an REL, but rather an open source metadata standard used for describing visual materials on the Internet, although it does allow for simple rights statements.  Rights is one of 15 “element sets” within its metadata schema.  Its simplicity makes it flexible and translatable to other languages and even allows it to provide a translation layer between other rights metadata standards.  It does not have a standard vocabulary.  Like ccRL, rights are expressed as readable HTML. 

Idealliance’s PRISM:  PRISM 3.0 is an REL specification developed by Idealliance, a membership organization.  It includes both standards for contract metadata and rights vocabulary metadata.   It is a strong, emerging resource for the multimedia publishingindustry.  A 2014 draft is under public review.  It is preceded by 2012 standards.  

IFTA:  (International Film and Trade Association).  This is not an REL but standards for contract and rights terms.  This association is member-based with 150 members from 23 countries.  

METSRights:  This is an open source REL designed for describing simple rights for digital objects.  Based upon the METS (Metadata Encoding and Transmission Language), it can hold information related to a rights holder, a rights declaration, and a rights context (the context in which the rights declaration is used and by whom).  METS itself is popular with National, Government and University Libraries including Harvard, Stanford and The National Library of Portugal, for example.    

MPEG-21:  This standard was started by the Moving Pictures Experts Group in 1988.  It created a brief rights data dictionary before adopting XrML as a REL standard.  Latest documents posted to its site date July 2005.  See XrML below.  and 

ODRL:  This open source resource for all media types was created by WC3.  It does have a vocabulary (ODRL version 2.1 vocabulary) but I personally caution that it may not adequately capture all details of emerging video rights and distribution channels. 

PLUS (Picture Licensing Universal System): This is not an REL but an international vocabulary standard for image use.  This is a non-profit, membership-based organization.  It has a wide range of image licensing terms and actions defined in its online, searchable glossary.  It also includes a matrix for content types and contract templates.  Used by major image libraries and organizations worldwide. 

RightsML: This is an open source REL based on ODRL above for news syndication.  It uses ODRL version 2.1 vocabulary.  

XrML:  This open source REL was originally developed by Xerox.  It was adopted as the basis for the rights expression language for MPEG-21.  Now owned and released by ContentGuard), it was proposed as a standard by Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard and VeriSign.  

 

 

Julia Goodwin (@julia.littlewing) is a Senior Manager in the Information Management practice of Optimity Advisors.  She has 18 years’ experience in the Media Industry in Application Development, Management, Innovation and a special interest in Rights Management.