ISO has formally approved the MPEG Rights Expression Language (MPEG REL) as a
standard, thereby completing a process that reached inevitability
last July
with
the MPEG REL's achievement of Final Draft International Standard status at ISO.
ISO MPEG REL, as it is now called, is part of the MPEG-21 framework of
standards for digital media. It is one of two new components of MPEG-21
that addresses rights issues, the other being the Rights Data Dictionary (RDD)
that serves to define terms used in rights transactions. ISO MPEG REL
derives directly from ContentGuard's XrML 2.0 rights language, which in turn was
derived from the Digital Property Rights Language invented by Dr. Mark Stefik at
Xerox PARC in the mid-1990s.
With the adoption by the Open Mobile Alliance of a variant of IPR Systems'
Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) in its OMA DRM 2.0 standard, the rights
language scene is now firmly a two-horse race. MPEG REL now has the
gravitas associated with the ISO blessing along with Microsoft's adoption of its
direct predecessor, while OMA DRM benefits from rapid market adoption in the
mobile content arena. Both standards now have plenty of room to actually
take hold in deployments before the Microsoft-strong PC world converges with the
Microsoft-weak mobile world, at which point the two standards will need to
interoperate somehow.
IE 7
Firefox 2.0
