NAN Today we’ll cover Digital Rights Management, or DRM Metadata Schemes - their purposes, elements, and several well-known examples.
NAN How can rights to digital objects, like music, movies, e-books, etc. be managed by their creators, rights owners and publishers? With DRM, stakeholders can manage both access and use of protected digital resources. It’s important to clarify that DRM is the 'digital management of rights' and not the 'management of digital rights'. That is, DRM manages all rights, not only the rights applicable to permissions over digital content" (Ianella, 2006, para. 2)
NAN This metadata, which sets out how digital resources may be used and accessed, provides the administrative information - including copyright, distribution, ownership and restrictions - that protect the resource according to applicable laws. In addition to protection, DRM also offers verification of a resources’ authenticity; some rights administrative metadata also includes descriptive information like the creator and date of creation. While some DRM schemes exist on their own, others are easily incorporated as a “rights section” in existing metadata schemes.
NAN Rights description defines the work’s copyright status, including the rights holder and definitions of legal use; Rights licensing outlines the contractual and licensing agreements of the resource; and Rights workflow languages exist to maintain control over how the work is accessed and used, including usage tracking and the enforcement of rights agreements - basically, any part of the workflow associated with a digital resource.
NAN These are the commonly found elements in rights metadata. Provenance refers to the resource’s origin and ownership - ideally it should be an unbroken chain detailing who owned the resource and when. Rights holder can sometimes include contact information, which can be helpful for access and use of the resource Most of these are self-explanatory, but a good example of user and user roles applies to us at McGill: for instance, the user roles on many databases McGill subscribes too will define users as only those registered students and faculty of the university It’s interesting to point out that although number 6, constraints, requirements and agreements, means the terms of use - for example, no copying of the resource - this is not necessarily enforceable. However, the condition is legally binding.
NAN Today we’ll discuss these four popular schemes; however, many more have been developed either specific collections, like Rutgers University Library, or PREMIS, specifically for preservation of digital resources
PAM ONIX is the first DRM metadata scheme we will discuss. It’s created by Editeur, released in 2000 It’s for booksellers selling digital books online to convey information about their products It has many data elements – and you’ll see an example shortly – 230, to be precise. It’s coded in XML, with linguistic tags and numeric tags to define the fields
PAM Indecs is created by a small consortium of organizations that put IP-protected content online It was established in 1998 It’s very complex – in fact, it’s ontology-based, meaning that it evolves. It maps to other schemes It provides a unique identification number for each digital object.
PAM OMA is for the mobile market – including devices and software. It’s made by the Open Mobile Alliance, and it was launched in 2002 It’s goal is interoperability across devices, geographic locations, providers and networks It’s XML-based and encrypted meaning that the device must have the matching rights object in order to access protected content.
PAM I’m sure you’re familiar with MPEG It’s made by the Moving Pictures Expert Group and goes back to 1988 The concepts of users and digital items are important with MPEG-21. It provides a framework in which one user interacts with another user, and the object of that interaction is a digital item. MPEG-21 has nine distinct parts, including the digital item declaration, digital item identification, intellectual property management and protection, a rights expression language and a rights data dictionary (MPEG-21, 2010).
PAM Now I’m going to compare two DRM metadata schemes: ONIX and indecs
PAM We’ll show you an example of ONIX metadata soon. It’s a widely-used format, used by the American Booksellers Association, Amazon and Barnes & Noble It’s convertible to MARC-21 and the only data that is lost is ONIX-only data. However, because it’s highly structured, there’s less flexibility for some fields, like the price and tax fields. But the structure makes it so that little manual intervention is needed and it also increases the speed of updates
PAM Indecs, of course, is for e-commerce of intellectual property. While researching, we found that several other metadata schemes are based on indecs (for example: MPEG-21). That is, they contain sections of indecs metadata. It’s a comprehensive metadata scheme that manages intellectual property at every stage of digital exchange. Each digital object is assigned an iids – an indecs identification number. Its weakness is also its strength: because indecs is so generic, many additional modifications may be needed in order to apply it to specific domains, such as coding legal judgments in different parts of the world.
PAM ONIX metadata is used by book publishers for digital objects This is only an excerpt of an ONIX metadata record It’s in XML In the header, there is the sender, the addressee, and the date sent In the product identifier section, there is a numeric id for the digital object Later on there are sections for descriptive details, measurements, title, contributor, subject, collateral (including any textual descriptions), publisher, market, suppliers, price, and tax.
PAM I’m sure you’re all familiar with what DRM means for downloading media, proprietary file formats, jailbreaking, etc. Using DRM-protected media illegally is common and usually not enforced well Many consumers—including myself—are concerned with how DRM will affect digital media that we use, and how digital media will be preserved or stored in archives and libraries DRM is regulated in many countries, to different extents, and covered usually under copyright law Right now, in Canada, Bill C-32 An Act to Amend the Copyright Act, is being discussed in the House of Commons Michael Geist, an Internet law expert (who has a very interesting Web site, by the way: MichaelGeist.ca) has written extensively about the harm that could be done through this legislation if it becomes law If this bill becomes law, libraries will be forced to implement DRM in their inter-library digital loans and would require that digital loans self-destruct within five days of first use and limit any copying or distribution In addition, there is no exception in Bill C-32 for archives preserving digital materials (yet other countries have this exception) Ideally, there should be an exception for libraries, school, museums, archives, etc. This is our digital heritage! Even if locks become obsolete or broken, there is no legal way of circumventing them under this Bill
PAM Does anyone have any questions about Digital Rights Management Metadata schemes?