Workbook on Digital Private Papers > Administrative and preservation metadata > Rights metadata for personal archives
Rights metadata for personal archives
Standards for digital rights management
Open Digital Rights Language
The Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) Initiative is an international effort aimed at developing and promoting an open standard for the Digital Rights Management expression language.
ODRL is designed to express all the elements of a digital rights licence to which a resource is subject, including identification of parties and all possible permissions covered by a licence. It has no mandatory elements, it allows the expression of very complex statements and is extensible, so it can be used in a variety of contexts. It also provides the semantics to express policies which might be enforced by a machine-actionable DRM system.
The ODRL Model (v. 1)
The ODRL model defines three core entities: assets, rights and parties.
Assets are any uniquely identifiable content. They may also contain components.
Rights include:
- Permissions - usages or activities allowed over the Assets (e.g. print an image Asset) - which may have:
- Constraints - these limit the use(s) allowed in some way (e.g. a particular category of user can print an image Asset up to a maximum of 1 times).
- Requirements - these are ‘obligations needed to exercise the Permission’ (e.g. pay £1.50 to print the image).
- Conditions - these specify scenarios where renegotiation of Permissions may be needed (e.g. if the user’s credit card expires, Permission to print the image ceases).
Parties include end users and rights holders and may be individuals, organisations, or defined roles.
Using these three entities ODRL can express Offers and Agreements. Offers are proposals by rights holders for specific rights over their Assets. Agreements are where Parties enter into contracts with specific Offers.
Karen Coyle suggests that it might be possible to develop preservation-related permission statements using rights languages like ODRL, but to date the standards have focused on current e-commerce applications and do not have a specific language for preservation actions. ODRL also focuses on rights granted by licence rather than copyright law which is more important to digital archivists.
