Rights Expression Languages and IPTC

IPTC andRights Expression Languages

Stuart Myles

Associated Press

10th March 2010

© 2010 IPTC (www.iptc.org) All rights reserved 2

Rights Examples

• “No New York”• “Not for Yahoo”• “No Canada mobile”• “No sales”• “Any non-commercial use, requires attribution”• “No Internet/Mobile usage without Football

Association Premier League (FAPL) license”• “No mobile use until 2 hours after the match,

website users are obliged to comply with DFL restrictions”

Usage Rights and News

• Looking at the examples of usage rights for news content, we see some common types of factors:

• Specific organizations• Types of organizations• Permitted or restricted actions (e.g. sales)• Required actions (e.g. attribution)• Time constraints• Geographic locations• Platforms (e.g. mobile)


IPTC and Rights ExpressionsNewsML 1 and NITF support a

semi-structured model


IPTC and Rights Expressions


• The G2 standards (NewsML-G2 et al) have a RightsInfo block

• Allows natural language statements

• Different model than NITF or NewsML1

IPTC and Rights


• Some members feel that IPTC needs to specify a rights expression language– Rights for content and metadata a recent focus for G2

• Ideally, this should be selecting an existing language, rather than developing a new REL

• Before simply selecting a language, we decided to conduct a survey, to discover the rights use cases

Rights Use Cases

• The survey was structured as five suggested use cases, to see if there was any commonality:– Four use cases concerning applying rights metadata within an

editorial system– One use case about rights metadata being sent from or received

from clients

• We got three responses, with little commonality• Interestingly, the main consensus was that the sending

and receiving rights metadata is important but that enforcement in editorial tools is not

• This appears to be contradictory– Why is it important to transmit rights if they aren’t to be acted

on?


Rights Expression Languages

• The survey sheds little light• There was not much notice, since we tried to get

responses shortly before this meeting• The use cases with most support (transmitting and

receiving rights) appear to already be supported by NewsML 1, NITF and G2

• However, let’s examine some existing RELs to see what they allow


Rights Expression Language• A machine-readable language to convey rights

associated with a piece of content• Automatically answer the question

– Can we use this content for this particular purpose?

• Rights:– Permissions and restrictions on the use of a piece of content– Granted by a rights holder to a user

• Basic Structure:– {Party A} grants {Party B} the right to {Action C} with {Item D}

under {Condition E}

• Such as MPEG-21, ODRL, PLUS, CCREL, ACAP, DDM


MPEG-21 / ISO REL


MPEG-21 expresses requirements for a Rights Expression LanguageImplemented as ISO/IEC21000/5:2004

A relatively simple data model, implemented as XML

Open Digital Rights Language• ODRL v1 exists, v2 in progress• More sophisticated model than ISO REL

http://odrl.net/2.0/WD-ODRL-Model.html


http://odrl.net/2.0/WD-ODRL-Model.html

PLUS

• PLUS Licensing Data Format• Provides standard vocabularies for creating licenses• Similar data model to ISO REL and ODRL• Specific vocabularies aimed at publishers of images• PLUS has a relationship with IPTC


CCREL

• Creative Commons• Grant of rights beyond “fair use”, to promote re-use• http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC_REL• Widely implemented, used in certain Yahoo! and Google

applications (chiefly to find rights cleared content)


http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC_REL

ACAP

• Automated Content Access Protocol• Version 1 aimed at web crawlers

– Expand upon robots.txt / Robots Exclusion Protocol

• Starting an ACAP Version 2• http://www.the-acap.org/


http://www.the-acap.org/

DDM

• Digital Distribution Management• AP’s ENPS led effort, principally for video, but applicable

to all media types

• Machine interpretable rules– Suggested XML syntax

• Public registry of Individual and Group IDs– Needs to be hosted by someone (maybe a role for IPTC?)

• Definitions of Common Use– Centrally managed vocabulary of “uses” and “distributions”


Next Steps?• What are IPTC’s next steps for adopting a REL?

• Do we try to better understand the use cases?• Do we need to get involved with either of the “new” REL

efforts (ODRL v2 or ACAP v2)?• Should IPTC define controlled vocabularies for

permissions, restrictions, constraints that are meaningful for news?

• Does IPTC want to take on an organizational role (e.g. central registry)?

• What else do we need to do, in order to pick a REL?


Rights Expression Languages and IPTC

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