Workbook on Digital Private Papers > Administrative and preservation metadata > Rights metadata for personal archives
Rights metadata for personal archives
Standards for digital rights management
MPEG-21 Part 5 (MPEG-21/5)
MPEG-21 was developed by the Moving Picture Experts Group and consists of a number of standards relating to digital multimedia resources. It is in seven parts, of which part 5 is the rights expression language and part 6 is a data dictionary containing terms for use in the rights expression language (which is not yet complete). MPEG-21/5 was developed for the commercial sector and derived from ContentGuard’s XrML language; it can be machine-actionable (i.e. interact with software or hardware to enforce licensed permissions and restrictions). While it was primarily intended for the licensing of digital audio and video resources, it is also a general-purpose rights language which can be applied to other digital objects; MPEG-21 is organised into separate sections so that particular sections (like MPEG-21/5) can be removed and used in other contexts. MPEG-21/5 is also the only rights expression language to be issued by a formal standards body, as ISO/IEC 21000-5.
It is based on the idea of a digital Resource, one or more Principals with a stake in that Resource (these can be either machine or human, e.g. a particular type of user), a set of Rights which are associated with the resource and Conditions to which these rights are subject. A Right is described as a verb; the Resource is the object of the Right and a Condition describes rules under which Rights can be exercised.
Like ODRL, MPEG/21/5 includes an extensive list of possible rights because it is intended to cover a wide range of situations; it is a generalised standard and can be used as the basis for developing more specific languages designed to deal with particular functions, e.g. the Open eBook Forum have extended MPEG-21/5 to support the management of rights for e-books. To date it has not been explored in depth as a possible archival rights solution and, like ODRL, it has the disadvantage of being unable to record metadata about copyright, the most important information in a digital archive context.
