Digital Rights Management Metadata and Standards

In the digital world, several ways to organize and describe digital rights management (DRM) have been developed to enforce fairness and transparency in business trades. Metadata is beginning to serve this purpose as it attempts to address property rights, licensing, privacy, and confidentiality issues in a manner that ideally renders information or content easily accessible over a variety of platforms (Koenen, 2001). With the rise of security breaches and computer crimes such as identity theft, DRM is increasingly an issue for creators, content owners, purveyors, and consumers of all sorts of digital materials. This article defines what DRM is and explains how it is implemented into description and assessment in practical metadata schemes. DRM components are discussed, in particular those related to identification and rights expression. The two commonly used standards of describing DRM are discussed with Open Mobile Alliance and MPEG-21 (Rosenblatt, 2005). Issues and problems of metadata in DRM are also discussed for future implications.