Not that it’s news, but many people may be unaware that the Open eBook Forum will be using the same basics for Rights Expression Language as the music and movie industries. A just-released white paper on the “The MPEG-21 Rights Expression Language” is available free from Rightscom. As discussed by the Music Industry News Network:

…rights owners need to know that their rights can be packaged with machine-readable licences, guaranteed to be ubiquitous, unambiguous and secure over any digital network. The MPEG REL makes all this possible…

The Open eBook Forum (www.openebook.org) is creating its own “Rights Grammar” based on the REL for securing rights in the distribution of ebooks, which is intended to be interoperable with the MPEG specification. This holds out the possibility that, in the future, different content sectors using different DRM technologies will be able to work together on the basis of a single REL.

Meanwhile here’s an important caveat from the white paper released by Rightscom:

While the REL will become a vital part of the DRM landscape, it is solely concerned with setting business rules. It does not provide any encryption functionality for content, though it does link to processes for ensuring the rights expressions themselves are tamper proof and capable of authentication.

The TeleRead take: Important questions emerge here. Whatever the specifics of technology, how respectful will DRM be of concepts such as fair use? And will it allow innovative approaches for libraries such as the permanent checkout concept? Done right, of course, and combined with nonproprietary encryption and the rest, a truly standardized REL could help the cause of a Universal Consumer Format for e-books. Will the OeBF step up to the plate? That remains to be seen.

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