The International Press Telecommunications Council is happy to announce that RightsML, IPTC’s Rights Expression Language for the media industry, has been updated to version 2.0.

RightsML allows publishers and media owners to express rights permissions and obligations based on geographic, time-based, and monetary restrictions.

This version contains major updates: it is now based on W3C’s Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) version 2.2 which became a W3C recommendation in February 2018.

ODRL allows content providers to “express permission, prohibition, and obligation statements to be associated to content.” RightsML extends on that base to provide standard expressions for geographic and time-based constraints, on a requirement to pay fixed amounts of money for use of the content, 

An example RightsML model which expresses that EPA (Example Press Agency) grants its partners geographic rights to distribute a content item in Germany is as follows:

Policy:
  type: "http://www.w3.org/ns/odrl/2/Set"
  uid: "http://example.com/RightsML/policy/idGeog1"
  profile: "https://iptc.org/std/RightsML/odrl-profile/"
  permission:
    - target: "urn:newsml:example.com:20120101:180106-999-000013"
      assigner: "http://example.com/cv/party/epa"
      assignee:
        type: "http://www.w3.org/ns/odrl/2/PartyCollection"
        uid: "http://example.com/cv/partygroup/epapartners"
      action: "http://www.w3.org/ns/odrl/2/distribute"
      constraint:
      - leftOperand: "http://www.w3.org/ns/odrl/2/spatial"
        operator: "http://www.w3.org/ns/odrl/2/eq"
        rightOperand: "http://cvx.iptc.org/iso3166-1a3/DEU"

This content model can also be expressed in XML or JSON. See the RightsML Simple geographic Example for more information.

More examples are on the RightsML 2.0 Examples page on the IPTC developer site.

IPTC has also created tools to help implementors understand and implement RightsML 2.0, including a generic guideline flow for evaluating ODRL documents and a RightsML policy builder tool.

For more details and help on implementing RightsML within your organisation, please join the IPTC RightsML mailing list. Membership of the group is open to the public. For discussion on developing further versions of the standard, please use the IPTC RightsML-dev list, open to all IPTC members.