[rights] Welcome to the OASIS Rights Language TC

["Reddy, Hari" <Hari.Reddy@CONTENTGUARD.COM>]

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, thomas.demartini@contentguard.com
John Erickson, Hewlett Packard, john_erickson@hpl.hp.com
Brad Gandee, ContentGuard, brad.gandee@contentguard.com
Thomas Hardjono, Verisign, thardjono@verisign.com
M. Paramasivam, Microsoft, parama@microsoft.com
David Parrott, Reuters, David.Parrott@reuters.com
Hari Reddy, ContentGuard, hari.reddy@contentguard.com

Chair
The TC chair will be Hari Reddy, ContentGuard.

Meeting Sponsors
Meeting sponsor is Hari Reddy, ContentGuard

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