[rights] Welcome to the OASIS Rights Language TC

Title: Welcome to the OASIS Rights Language TC

Hello Everyone:

I would like to convey my personal gratitude to everyone that has joined the RLTC. I look forward to meeting with everyone at the first meeting which is a face to face meeting on May 21 in Bethesda, Maryland.

I would like to request that people reconfirm to me in the next few days, their attendance at the first meeting. I will need this list to facilitate the final logistics.

I am also enclosing at the end of this note as reference, a copy of the Proposal that Karl sent out to establish the RLTC .

The following are more details about the first meeting:

1. Membership 

I am very excited to announce that beyond the initial list of OASIS members that submitted the RLTC Proposal, we have been joined by members from the following OASIS member firms:

- Bank of America

- Cisco

- Commerce One

- divine.com

- Entegrity

- Entrust

- IBM

- Waveset

We have also been joined by several other members who are registered with OASIS as Individual members.

The following is the membership list. If your name does not appear on this list, please contact me as soon as possible.

Member  Firm   

Hari Reddy, Chairperson ContentGuard   

               

Carlisle Adams  Entrust

Bob Atkinson    Microsoft      

Henry Chadwick  IBM    

Zachary P Coffin        Individual     

Thomas DeMartini        ContentGuard   

John Erickson   H.P.   

Buck Flannigan  divine.com     

Brad Gandee     ContentGuard   

Bob Glushko     Commerce One   

Thomas Hardjono Verisign       

Masahito Kawamori       Individual     

William Koenig  Bank of America Technology & Operations

Hal Lockhart    Entegrity      

James MacLean   Individual     

M. Paramasivam  Microsoft      

David Parrott   Reuters

Harry Piccariello       ContentGuard   

Darran Rolls    Waveset

Krishna Sankar  Cisco  

Peter Schirling IBM    

Xin Wang        ContentGuard   

2. Logistics for the first F2F meeting

A. Date: May 21, 2002

B. Time: 8:30 - 6:30

ContentGuard will be hosting a dinner for that evening for the membership. Details of the location will be provided at the meeting.

C. Location: 

ContentGuard Offices

6500 Rock Spring Drive, Suite 110

Bethesda, Maryland 20817

D. Hotel Information

Walking Distance from the meeting location:

Marriott Suites

Democracy Blvd.

Bethesda, MD

301-897-5600

Approximately 8 miles away:

Homestead Suites

Gaithersburg, MD

301-987-9100

(Note: Please request the ContentGuard rate which I believe is 69/night)

E. Airport Information

The meeting location is convenient from any of the 3 major airports in the Washington DC area: Washington Dulles, Reagan-National, Baltimore-Washington International. I have found BWI to be cheaper with regards to the fares. Dulles and Ronald-Reagan are closer, however.

3. Agenda

The Agenda for the first meeting will be in 5 blocks:

Block 1: Introduction to the RLTC and OASIS guidelines.

Block 2: Member Introductions

Block 3: Presentation and Development of the Work Plan

Block 4: Mini-Technical Review of XrML

Block 5: Meeting Conclusion/Action Item Review

If anyone has any questions, please feel free to contact me. Again, thank you very much for your participation and I look forward to meeting and working with each of you.

Regards,

Hari Reddy

Chairperson

Office 240-694-1246

Rights Language Technical Committee 

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Name

The name of this technical committee shall be the OASIS Rights Language

Technical Committee.

Technical Committee Purpose

The Internet has spawned a revolution in how content is distributed and

services are accessed.  This has fueled the development of technologies

to manage, secure, control, and automate the flow of content and the

access to services over the Internet, as well as other digital

distribution techniques. Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the common

term collectively associated with such technologies. If we consider the

DRM lifecycle or workflow for digital content and services, we see that

the exchange of rights and conditions information is required between

the entities in the workflow or at each step of the lifecycle. We also

realize that expressing rights can be simple or very complex depending

upon the requirements of the entire workflow and business models.

Thus, a common standard rights language that can be shared among the

participants in this digital workflow is required.  This common rights

language will facilitate the interoperability of the systems that manage

the creation, distribution and consumption of these digital works and

services.  It will also be an integral tool in declaring and

implementing trust and authentication mechanisms.

The need for a standard rights language has been recognized in a number

of organizations that develop technical standards for different types of

content in many different domains.  For example;

* Open eBook Forum - eBooks

* MPEG - multimedia content

* TV Anytime - multimedia content in a specific domain

* Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) - multimedia content in a specific

domain

* PRISM - periodical print publishing

* Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers - Digital Cinema

* NewsML - news agency content, print publishing

Additionally, fields such as healthcare (HIPPA compliance) and financial

services (SEC regulations compliance) have now recognized the need for

the ability to express usage and access rights for documents, records

and services.

However, typically each is focused on a specific market or media type.

None have addressed the need for interoperability of the components that

manage the creation, distribution and consumption of this content from

one system to a different system within and across these different

domains.  OASIS has the broad membership base, open development process

and neutrality as to content type or format that make it the logical

home for the development, maintenance and promotion of a broadly

applicable standard rights language.

The purpose of this TC is to:

1. Continue work previously done by ContentGuard, Inc. on XrML to define

the industry standard for a rights language that supports a wide variety

of business models and has an architecture that provides the flexibility

to address the needs of the diverse communities that have recognized the

need for a rights language. The language needs to continue to be:

- Comprehensive: Capable of expressing simple and complex rights

- Generic: Capable of describing rights for any type of digital content

or service

- Precise: Communicates precise meaning to all components of the system

- Interoperable: Comprehends it is part of a tightly integrated system

- Agnostic: To platform, media type or format

2. Define a governance and language extension development process for

the language that comprehends maintaining an evergreen language while

minimizing the impact of change on all market participants.

3. Define the relationship with other complementary standards efforts

within OASIS (e.g. SAML).  Liaison with standards bodies external to

OASIS that are working on complementary technologies (security, PKI, web

services)

4. Define relationship and establish liaisons with standards bodies that

have identified the need for a rights language.  This activity will

promote the maintenance of a Core architecture that provides the basis

for interoperability across different content domains as well as broader

applicability of the tools and applications that create and consume

rights expressions.

ContentGuard will submit the eXtensible rights Markup Language(tm) (XrML(tm))

Version 2.0 at the initial meeting of the TC. ContentGuard has

copyrights to the XrML 2.0 specification and schema (including previous

releases) along with a trademark on the name "XrML". ContentGuard also

owns US Patents 5,638,443, 5,634,012, 5,715,403, and 5,629,980 which

have claims that may necessarily be infringed by the use of the

contribution. ContentGuard will grant OASIS permission to use the

trademark "XrML" for the use of the TC and associated promotion and

marketing. ContentGuard's contribution will be submitted with the

following intellectual property rights statement: "ContentGuard agrees

to offer a license, on reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms, to use

any patent claim of US Patents 5,638,443, 5,634,012, 5,715,403, and

5,629,980 and which is necessarily infringed by the use of the

contribution."

Relationship to Existing OASIS TCs

We would anticipate developing relationships with the following OASIS

TCs:

* Security Services TC: XrML and SAML complement each other, in the

sense that one can implement systems that interpret XrML expressions

using the SAML framework.

* Access Control Markup Language TC: While XrML and XACML are closely

related in terms of controlling resource access and usage, the scope of

their applicability is very different.

* ebXML TCs: Given the potential applications for XrML in modeling

contractual relationships, there are potential synergies between the

ebXML and Rights Language TCs.

Proposed list of Deliverables

The primary deliverables of the Rights Language TC will be:

1. To release the rights language Schema with supporting implementation

information.

2. To develop and execute governance process for managing the continuing

improvements to the language.

3. To provide liaisons to other complementary standards bodies.

4. Policies defining the creation of extensions to the language

5. Definition of a subset or mapping of the rights language for mobile

consumer electronic devices.

6. Definition of common methods for integration of the rights language

with metadata standards, content/service identification standards, and

content referencing standards.

7. Definition of common methods for integration of the rights language

with authentication, crypto and PKI standards for econtent distribution

and for web services.

The deliverables will be accomplished in 3 Phases:

Phase 1: Requirements Gathering and TC Structure Development (3 months)

Enhance language specification taking requirements from other standards

initiatives and content/web service value chain participants such as

content/web service owners, technology providers, and service providers.

Develop Governance Process for management of the language.

Phase 2: Language Development & Initial Language Release (3 months)

Develop use cases and scenarios. Develop integration models to other

standards initiatives. Develop sample value chain models employing

various features of the language. Develop/release working draft of the

language for review.  Release the language with supporting

implementation information and guides based on feedback.

Phase 3: Evergreen Process - ongoing. Develop/execute process for

continuous improvement of the language based upon guidelines developed

in Phase 1. Continue to provide liaisons to complementary standards

initiatives.

Based on the above tentative schedule, the goal is to release the rights

language (Phase 2) 6 months from the start of the TC.  During Phases

1-3, initiatives such as interoperability guides and test suites to

assist in deployments will be developed/released.

Language in which the TC will conduct business

English

Date and time of first meeting

The initial face to face meeting is scheduled for May 21, 2002 in

Bethesda, Maryland at the ContentGuard offices.

Meeting schedule for the first year following the formation of the TC

Bi-weekly conference calls; Quarterly face-to-face meetings.

Names, affiliation, and electronic mail addresses of persons eligible to

participate in a TC and committed to the meeting schedule and purpose:

Thomas DeMartini, ContentGuard, 

John Erickson, Hewlett Packard, 

Brad Gandee, ContentGuard, 

Thomas Hardjono, Verisign, 

M. Paramasivam, Microsoft, 

David Parrott, Reuters, 

Hari Reddy, ContentGuard, 

Chair

The TC chair will be Hari Reddy, ContentGuard.

Meeting Sponsors

Meeting sponsor is Hari Reddy, ContentGuard

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