[rights-requirements] XACML Usecases and Requirements

[Hal Lockhart <hal.lockhart@entegrity.com>]

Title: XACML Usecases and Requirements

My research so far has led me to the tentative conclusion that Digital Rights Management is a subset of the general field of Access Control. The only distinction I have been find is that Rights Management involves an Access Decision about a Digital Work, that is to say, some information with associated Intellectual Property Rights.

This is a broad subset indeed. Situations involving works in the Public Domain would be excluded, of course but they are not usually access protected anyway. The major excluded cases would be where the main purpose of the interaction is something other than information retrieval, such as an online transaction. If I buy a lawn chair online from Sears, there is probably an implied copyright on the receipt, but that is not the point of the interaction.

Given the close affinity of these fields, it strikes me that the usecases and abstracted requirements which were developed for XACML may provide useful input to the Rights TC and save the TC the time and trouble of collecting them again.

In reading the usecases, it should generally be assumed that the information in question is a digital work. It seems to me that only the usecases submitted by Gil Pilz (3rd party user provisioning and 3rd party organizational subscription) are clearly not Rights Management. I believe most of the requirements are potentially applicable.

I will be interested to hear the reactions of others.

Hal

 

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