MPEG-21 and Its Interoperability with Rights-Information Standards

Providing effective protection and management for broadcast content is an important issue. However, multiple standards for managing protected broadcast programs exist today. Heterogeneous devices with different content-protection mechanisms face an interoperability problem in exchanging and interpreting various types of rights information that have different syntax and semantics. This article analyzes several rights information standards and demonstrates the promise of achieving convergence of the rights information and interoperability between these standards through the MPEG-21 Rights-Expression-Languages Dissemination-and-Capture profile.