DDM

DDM is Digital Distribution Management. It is an effort led by AP's ENPS, principally for video, but applicable to all media types.

“DDM (Digital Distribution Management) attempts to address these challenges by suggesting standard metadata, rules and definitions which unambiguously describe video Ownership and Distribution Rights within the context of News. DDM also allows this information to be associated with video to the level of individual frames.”

The key design features of DDM are

• Machine interpretable rules - with a suggested XML syntax
• Public registry of Individual and Group IDs - this would need to be hosted by someone (maybe a role for IPTC?)
• Centrally managed vocabulary of “uses” and “distributions”

At the time of writing, RightsML offers the machine interpretable rules (and an XML syntax in the form of ODRL) along with the centrally managed set of vocabularies for permissions, restrictions and duties. However, the idea of a public registry for individual organizations and groups would still help with interoperability.