Digital Rights Expression Languages (DRELs)
by Chris Barlas
July 2006
Executive Summary
Universities and colleges within the F&HE sector are both rights holders and rights users and often need to both grant and use their rights in ways that are not catered for by the 'blanket' approach of most commercial DRM systems e.g. fair dealing for non-commercial research, library privilege and exceptions for examinations.
Understanding Digital Rights Management is therefore becoming increasingly important within Higher and Further education and has had considerable impact on the core areas of activity: teaching, learning, administration and research. Materials, both for teaching and research, are rapidly being digitised and much information and library infrastructure is increasingly being predicated on a digital architecture and the availability and distribution of electronic materials. The subject of DRM, however, is becoming increasingly complex and difficult to map for a non-expert, and the aim of this TechWatch report is firstly, to separate out two important digital rights concepts: the expression of rights and the implementation of rights, and secondly, to investigate the expression of rights through the use of Digital Rights Expression Languages (DRELs).
The 2004 JISC/Intrallect report into DRM included some discussion of the role of Digital Rights Expression Languages (DRELs) within the DRM environment in HE/FE. DRELs allow asserted rights over content (most obviously copyright) to be expressed in a machine-readable format and facilitate the dissemination of this information along with more general metadata, for example, when metadata is harvested from cataloguing systems. It is generally recognised that existing metadata have an inadequate structure for handling such rights information. As part of its final recommendations the report called for JISC to 'maintain a watching brief on the future development of enforcement systems, particularly to ensure that suitable DRELs are in use'. As a contribution to this process this JISC TechWatch report discusses the role and use of rights within HE/FE, outlines the concepts, background and state-of-the art with regard to the development of DRELs, reviews existing languages (e.g. ODRL, XrML, MPEG-21/5, METSrights), discusses the developing standards agenda and speculates on likely future developments with the technology and its use in the education community.