Formalisation of Digital Rights Management: a Negotiation Scenario

One key issue when dealing with multimedia content systems is taking care of possible Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) management and distribution associated to the content itself. This is applicable to both mobile and fixed access situations. Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems are being developed to solve this issue. Although many of them already exist, their use is not easy, due to, between other reasons, a lack of interoperability of solutions. The current research trend is to formalise the interchange and expression of digital rights information, and the identification of protection tools. MPEG, through MPEG-21, is already working on this, by developing standards on IPMP (Intellectual Property Management and Protection), REL (Rights Expression langage) and RDD (Rights Data Dictionary). After introducing these concepts, the paper presents a formalisation we are proposing on the IPR domain, together with a specific DRM scenario, that of negotiation. The paper finalises with the description of the implementations we are carrying out in this area.