ContentGuard's IP portfolio, which it initially inherited from Xerox, includes patents on the use of a "rights grammar" in what we now call a DRM implementation.  Although Mark Stefik of Xerox PARC invented a specific rights language, DPRL, and ContentGuard developed DPRL into XrML, the company's patents do not specify any one particular rights language.  Therefore, ContentGuard sought to get XrML established in the market by giving it over to a standards body for further development, with the understanding that whatever language resulted from that development would still be covered by its patents.  ContentGuard made a so-called RAND declaration to the RLTC, signifying that any implementations of the RLTC's language would read on its patents, which it would license under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, in accordance with OASIS's policy on intellectual property licensing.

Unfortunately, the RLTC became bogged down in a number of issues that impeded progress.  These included concern over the implications of InterTrust's patent dispute with Microsoft over DRM intellectual property (coupled with InterTrust's lack of participation in the RLTC) and over proliferation of related standards initiatives in other bodies, such as IEEE and IETF.  Some observers also felt that progress was held up by arguments over how to account for consumers' rights in copyright law, such as fair use in the US, fair dealing in the UK and Canada, and private copying in many EU countries.  Such laws tend not to be proscriptive or precise enough to be embodied in a rights language, so the concerns raised over them might more properly be considered "meta-rights-language" considerations.  Leonardo Chiariglione's Digital Media Project is dealing with these kinds of issues nowadays.

For its part, ContentGuard remained involved in the RLTC but shifted its hopes of standards body adoption to MPEG.  MPEG selected XrML Version 2 over other rights languages, modified the language slightly, and ratified it as MPEG REL, part of the MPEG-21 suite of standards and now also an ISO standard.  Meanwhile, OASIS continues active work on other security-related standards, such as XACML (eXtensible Access Control Markup Language), which PSS Systems is using in its Enterprise DRM solution.

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