IPTC and Rights Expression Languages
In March 2010, the IPTC started to look at the support for rights expression in our standards for news exchange: NITF, NewsML 1.2 and NewsML-G2. Each standard offered support for semi-structured natural language statements about rights and restrictions. However, we concluded that we needed a machine-readable solution, principally for the G2 family of standards.
A Rights Expression Lanaguage (REL) is a machine-readable language to convey rights associated with a piece of content.
The idea is to be able to automatically answer the question "Can we use this content for this particular purpose?" Rights are permissions and restrictions on the use of a piece of content, granted by a rights holder to a user. The basic structure is
{Party A} grants {Party B} the right to {Action C} with {Item D} under {Condition E}
Note that this is advice from the provider of the content to the recipient. A Rights Expression Language is not, in itself, a DRM system, which seeks to directly control the access and use of digital content. For the use cases the IPTC identified, the REL is used to clarify and automate the proper use of content.
After some discussion, and conducting a survey about rights among the membership, the IPTC decided that it would prefer to select an existing rights framework, rather than developing an entirely new Rights Expression Language from scratch. The framework selected, however, would need to meet the needs of the news industry and it would have to allow for expansion and customization.
We drew up some rights expression requirements and evaluated several candidate rights languages: MPEG-21/ISO REL, PLUS, CCREL, ACAP, DDM and ODRL. We selected the ODRLv2 framework. The IPTC partnered with ACAP to construct a news-specific set of vocabularies as an ODRL profile. This profile is now known as "RightsML".