MPEG to standardize rights management

The Moving Picture Experts Group concluded its 58th meeting claiming progress in digital rights management, an area where MPEG lags behind competing, proprietary digital media technologies. MPEG, which has set a deadline of March 2003 for standardizing its rights-management protocol, reviewed nine proposals for a Rights Data Dictionary and Rights Expression Language (RDD-REL), posted a working draft of the RDD specification on its Web site, and promised a REL draft in the near future.

MPEG also formed a new Joint Video Team in an alliance between ISO/IEC (the International Organization for Standardization and the International Electrotechnical Commission) and the International Telecommunication Union. That team will assume the work previously under way with the H.26L project to standardize video coding. MPEG also issued a preliminary call for proposals for Digital Item Adaptation, a protocol to define tools for the adaptation of multimedia content to various media and devices. MPEG will issue its final call for proposals in March. --Paul Festa, Special to ZDNet News