From OPIMA to MPEG IPMP-X: A standard's history across R&D projects

This paper describes the work performed by a number of companies and universities who have been working as a consortium under the umbrella of the European Union Framework Programme 5 (FP5), Information Society Technologies (IST) research program, in order to provide a set of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies and architectures, aiming at helping to reduce the copyright circumvention risks, that have been threatening the music and film industries in their transition from the “analogue” to “digital” age. The paper starts by addressing some of the earlier standardization efforts in the DRM arena, namely, Open Platform Initiative for Multimedia Access (OPIMA). One of the described FP5 IST projects, Open Components for Controlled Access to Multimedia Material (OCCAMM), has developed the OPIMA vision. The paper addresses also the Motion Pictures Expert Group—MPEG DRM work, starting from the MPEG Intellectual Propriety Management and Protection—IPMP “Hooks”, towards the MPEG IPMP Extensions, which has originated the first DRM-related standard (MPEG-4 Part 13, called IPMP Extensions or IPMP-X) ever released by ISO up to the present days.2 The paper clarifies how the FP5 IST project MPEG Open Security for Embedded Systems (MOSES), has extended the OPIMA interfaces and architecture to achieve compliance with the MPEG IPMP-X standard, and how it has contributed to the achievement of “consensus” and to the specification, implementation (Reference Software) and validation (Conformance Testing) of the MPEG IPMP-X standard.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Rights Markup Extensions for the Protection of Indigenous Knowledge

Indigenous cultures have experienced a renaissance over the past 5-10 years as indigenous communities have recognized the importance of documenting and sharing their cultural heritage and history. This has coincided with the explosion of the internet and the widespread application of multimedia technologies to the construction of large online cultural collections. Together these developments have triggered a demand for copyright protection mechanisms. A number of XML-based markup languages (XrML, ODRL) have been developed to support the expression of rights asssociated with the intellectual property of resources. The MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework standard being developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) aims to standardize such a language to enable the management and protection of intellectual property associated with multimedia content. However it has been widely recognized that modern intellectual property laws, which are rapidly assuming global uniformity, fail to protect indigenous knowledge adequately or to support traditional or customary laws governing rights over indigenous knowledge. This paper considers some of the requirements for the protection of indigenous knowledge and the enforcement of tribal customary laws associated with knowledge, which have been expressed by Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. It assesses the ability of the two major XML-based rights markup languages (XrML and ODRL) to satisfy these requirements and suggests extensions to these languages to improve their support for indigenous knowledge protection. The aim of this paper is to provide a starting point which will encourage input, feedback and suggestions from indigenous communities. This will enable a clearer understanding of their diverse requirements with respect to the protection of intellectual property and traditional knowledge and the development of a satisfactory solution through future collaboration and consultation. Given a standardized machine-understandable representation of rights information, the utopian dream of trusted systems - automated rights enforcement and secure transactions involving both indigenous and non-indigenous resources - moves one step closer. But more importantly, the recognition of customary law and the rights of indigenous cultures within such systems, will lead to greater cross-cultural understanding, respect and tolerance and the promotion of indigenous social, cultural and economic development

Rights and services interoperability for multimedia content management

The main goal of the work presented in this thesis is to describe the definition of interoperability mechanisms between rights expression languages and policy languages. Starting from languages interoperability, the intention is to go a step further and define how services for multimedia content management can interoperate by means of service-oriented generic and standardised architectures. In order to achieve this goal, several standards and existing initiatives will be analysed and taken into account. Regarding rights expression languages and policy languages, standards like MPEG-21 Rights Expression Language (REL), Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) and eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) are considered. Regarding services for content management, the Multimedia Information Protection And Management System (MIPAMS), a standards-based implemented architecture, and the Multimedia Service Platform Technologies (MSPT), also known as MPEG-M standard, are considered. The contribution of this thesis is divided into two parts, one devoted to languages interoperability and the other one devoted to services interoperability, both addressed to multimedia content management. They are briefly described next. The first part of the contribution describes how MPEG-21 REL, ODRL and XACML can interoperate, defining the mapping mechanisms to translate expressions from language to language. The mappings provided have different levels of granularity, starting from a mapping based on a programmatic approach coming from high-level modelling diagrams done using Unified Modelling Language (UML) and Entity-Relationship (ER). The next level of mappings includes specific mappings between MPEG-21 REL and XACML and ODRL and XACML. Finally, a more general solution is proposed by using a broker. Part of this work was done in the context of the VISNET-II Network of Excellence and the AXMEDIS Integrated Project. The findings done prove the validity of the interoperability methods described. The second part of the contribution describes how to describe standards based building blocks to provide interoperable services for multimedia content management. This definition is based on the analysis of existing content management use cases, from the ones involving less security over multimedia content managed to the ones providing full-featured digital rights management (DRM) (including access control and ciphering techniques) to support secure content management. In this section it is also presented the work done in the research projects AXMEDIS, Musiteca and Culturalive. It is also shown the standardisation work done for MPEG-M, particularly on elementary services and service aggregation. To demonstrate the usage of both technologies a mobile application integrating both MPEG-M and MIPAMS is presented. Furthermore, some conclusions and future work is presented in the corresponding section, together with the refereed publications, which are briefly described in the document. In summary, the work presented can follow different research lines. On the one hand, further study on rights expression languages and policy languages is required as new versions of them have recently appeared. It is worth noting the standardisation of a contract expression language, MPEG-21 CEL, which has also to be further analysed in order to evaluate its interoperability with rights and policy languages. On the other hand, standard initiatives must be followed in order to complete the map of SB3's, considering MPEG standards and also other standards not only related to multimedia but also other application scenarios, like e-health or e-government

iDRM - Interoperability Mechanisms for Open Rights Management Platforms

Today’s technology is raising important challenges in the Intellectual Property (IP) field in general and to Copyright in particular [Arkenbout et al., 2004]. The same technology that has made possible the access to content in a ubiquitous manner, available to everyone in a simple and fast way, is also the main responsible for the challenges affecting the digital content IP of our days [Chiariglione, 2000]. Technological solutions and legal frameworks were created to meet these new challenges. From the technological point of view, Rights Management Systems (RMS) and Copy Protection Systems (CPS) have been developed and deployed to try to cope with them. At first, they seemed to work however, their closed and non-interoperable nature and a growing number of wrong strategic business decisions, soon lead to a strong opposition. One of the strongest negative points is the lack of rights management interoperability [Geer, 2004]. The work presented on this thesis primarily addresses the RMS interoperability problems. The objective of the thesis is to present some possible mechanisms to improve the interoperability between the different existing and emerging rights management platforms [Guth, 2003a]. Several different possible directions to rights management interoperability are pointed in this thesis. One of the most important is openness. Interoperability between different rights management mechanisms can only be achieved if they are open up to a certain level. Based on this concept, an open rights management platform is designed and presented in this thesis. Also, some of the interoperability mechanisms are presented and explained. This platform makes usage of the emerging service-oriented architectures to provide a set of distributed rights management services. Rights management solutions rely heavily on the establishment of authenticated and trust environments between its different elements. While considering different RMS, the establishment of such trust environments can be somehow complex. This thesis provides a contribution to the establishment of interoperable RMS trust environments through the usage of Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI) mechanisms. Modern rights management systems have to handle with both keying material and licenses which are used mostly to define how content is governed by the system. Managing this is a complex and hard task when different rights management solutions are considered. This thesis presents and describes a generic model to handle the key and license management life cycle, that can be used to establish a global interoperable management solution between different RMS

Case Study: DRM-protected Music Interoperability and e-Innovation

This report – representing one of three case studies that are part of a transatlantic research project aimed at exploring the potential relation between ICT Interoperability and eInnovation – examines issues surrounding DRM interoperability within the context of music content. Recognizing that interoperability will likely be defined differently by different stakeholders, we begin by establishing a rough, holistic working definition of interoperability and then assess the implementation of DRM in the music content market and associated problems with regard to interoperability. We then go on to explore the technological, market, and legal environments in their relation to and impact upon the achievement of interoperable DRM systems. In part 2, we analyze potential benefits and drawbacks of an interoperable DRM environment for the music content market. We then evaluate both private and public-initiated approaches towards the accomplishment of interoperability using a series of qualitative benchmarks. Lastly, we conclude by summing up the merits and demerits of the various approaches. Our findings lead us to surmise that normative considerations weigh in favor of greater interoperability in general. The challenge of determining the optimal level of interoperability and the best approach for attaining it, however, points toward consideration of a number of complex factors. We conclude that the best way to determine the optimal level of interoperability and means of accomplishing it is to rely upon economic-based assessments on a case-by-case basis

Conceptualisation of rights and meta-rule of law for the web of data

This article deals with some regulatory and legal problems of the Web of Data. Data and metadata are defined. Digital Rights Management (DRM) and Rights Expression Languages (REL) are introduced. Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL), Licensed Linked Data Resources (LLDR) and Creative Commons Licenses are referred. The development of REL by means of Ontology Design Patterns such as LLDR, or Open Licenses sustained by Policy Models such as ODRL, situates the discussion on metadata at the regulatory level. With the development of the Web of Data the Rule of Law needs to evolve to a Meta-Rule of Law, incorporating tools to regulate and monitor the semantic layer of the Web. This means reflecting on the construction of a new public dimension space for the exercise of rights

EDU-DRM: A Digital Rights Management (DRM) system for K-12 education

The technological achievements in digital publishing have made paperless education possible even in K-12 education. Aside from high bandwidth distribution infrastructure, the main difficulties of digital publishing are preserving personal information and protecting the rights of copyrighted contents. Although specially designed Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems can be used to control distribution and usage of private and/or copyrighted contents in K-12 education, dealing with a large number of bursty concurrent access requests and changing the access rights of a large number of students from one content class to another at the end of each education period make the problem different from existing ones. This paper introduces a new DRM system, called EDU-DRM, which includes a novel bit based authorization approach to reduce the processing time for authorization requests and automatize the access right adjustments with predefined rules for K-12 education. During the study, an experimental framework is designed using Apache Bench to analyze the proposed approach and evaluate it. The system is compared with XML based authorization approach and the results are presented in the paper. (C) 2019 Sharif University of Technology. All rights reserved