Nowadays, many types of digital content exist and even more ways in which the content can be consumed. Together with these new ways to express digital content came new business models for trading digital content. Digital Rights Management systems were built to govern transactions. This paper discusses a design methodology for creating a Digital Policy Management system, being a part of Digital Rights Management systems. The introduced Digital Policy Management system uses a standards-based approach combining parts of the MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework. For implementing a Digital Policy Management system an architecture of a Governed Execution Environment is defined. It contains a Rights Analysis Tool, which derives the required rights for sets of execution steps using a three-step process of tracking, filtering, and analysis. Finally, this paper shortly discusses two application scenarios: Digital Item Processing and AJAX, in which the introduced design methodology can be applied.

Executive Summary The protection of rights over digital content is becoming increasingly visible to the general public as the rights controls associated with newer digital technologies such as DVD films and iPod music players start to make their presence felt. This is no less true in the education world where digitised research and teaching content is being handled through libraries, VLEs and Web portals. This change is throwing up new issues regarding rights protection, copyright and the need to understand the technological issues involved. Technology, in the form of the Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems which enforce rights protection policies, has a major role to play. But how do these rights get expressed in the first place? For humans they are documented in formal statements, codified in laws and expressed in contracts and terms and conditions. However, in order for rights to be handled by computer systems they must be expressed in a formal, machine-readable manner and this is the subject of this TechWatch report: Digital Rights Expression Languages (DRELs). The report makes a clear distinction between DRELs and the DRM systems that carry out the technical enforcement. It concentrates on providing an introduction to DRELs, the technologies involved, and their possible use in higher and further education. The report explains what DRELs are, the role they play and their generic structure as well as discussing the two most well known languages, ISO MPEG REL and ODRL, and some of the alternatives such as METSRights and XACML. Coverage is also given to the standards that are being applied to this area and the complex history and role of patents. The report also discusses the differences between DRELs and Trust-based systems, which are exemplified by Creative Commons, and discusses the role of what are known as 'soft' rights which are widely used by education and, in particular, libraries. Soft rights such as 'fair use' (e.g. small scale copying for research purposes) are enshrined in copyright law, but are difficult to encode in rights languages due to the nature of their-deliberate on the part of lawmakers-ambiguity. Whilst for some this may throw into question the use of DRM systems in environments where such widespread use of these ambiguities is essential, the author points out a little known detail of the European Copyright Directive in which a contract may, legitimately, be used to avoid such exceptions and limitations in the case of enforcement …