Workbook on Digital Private Papers > Administrative and preservation metadata > Rights metadata for personal archives
Rights metadata for personal archives
Standards for digital rights management
Linking IPR information to groups and single digital objects is a core activity of a digital repository. While all digital objects will be subject to copyright law, some materials will be covered by different conditions under contract or licence. Rights metadata must therefore express both of these.
There are various metadata standards which include fields for statements of digital rights. These standards have been developed to address the issue of digital rights management in different contexts and to serve different purposes. Some have grown out of the e-commerce community (e.g. to protect rights in music downloads which are purchased under licence), while others have been developed within the digital library community to describe the rights connected with particular information resources. Most of them are specifically intended for a digital context (e.g. Creative Commons and MPEG-21/5); others are flexible (e.g. METSRights and ODRL do not exclude non-digital resources); and others need to be adapted to the digital environment (e.g. EAD, which was designed to catalogue archives in any format but has a strong emphasis on traditional paper-based material).
Some proprietary rights expression languages exist too, e.g. Adobe Content Manager, which allows the creator of a PDF document to add digital rights mechanisms to restrict how document is used by others; Microsoft Windows rights management solutions are expressed in eXtensible rights Markup Language (XrML), which is owned by ContentGuard. See Paradigm's Guidance for creators (Appendix B: Guidelines for creators of personal archives) for an outline of the problems associated with such tools for digital curators. Rather than simply expressing the terms of contracts or licences, these rights languages act as components of a digital rights management system which includes machine-enforceable implementations of certain rights and constraints on the user.
Below is an overview and brief description of the main open standards for digital rights management; these allow the expression of rights statements associated with a particular digital object or resource, rather than forming the basis of machine-enforceable technical or copy protection measures. Most are forms of descriptive metadata, which are aimed at imparting rights information to the users of a digital resource, although maintaining access-related rights metadata is also crucial for the digital curators who manage the material. PREMIS, however, focuses specifically on the rights information digital archivists need to know in order to carry out preservation activities. The most useful standards for archivists are those which allow the expression of general copyright conditions, rather than being limited to describing detailed contractual conditions such as specific permitted acts; 'fair dealing', for instance, is open to interpretation and is not easily codified into permitted or restricted acts.
